Networks

Routing Without Rumor: Securing the Internet’s Routing System

The Domain Name System has provided the fundamental service of mapping internet names to addresses from almost the earliest days of the internet’s history. Billions of internet-connected devices use DNS continuously to look up Internet Protocol addresses of the named resources they want to connect to - for instance, a website such as blog.verisign.com. Once a device has the resource’s address, it can then communicate with the resource using the internet’s routing system.

Why Over Compliance With Sanctions at Internet Infrastructure Level Can Have Devastating Effects on Ordinary People

On Friday, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's digital transformation minister, asked Cloudflare and Amazon to stop serving Russian web resources and protecting Russian services. He said in a tweet that Ukraine was "calling on Amazon to stop providing cloud services in Russia." He also said that "Cloudflare should not protect Russian web resources while their tanks and missiles attack our kindergartens."

How Not to Take Russia Off the Internet

Last week the Ukrainian government sent a letter to ICANN asking them to revoke the ".ru", ".рф" and ".su" top-level domains. It also said they were asking RIPE, which manages IP addresses in Europe, to revoke Russian IP addresses. Both ICANN and RIPE said no. Other people have explained why it would have been a policy disaster, but beyond that, neither would actually have worked.

Another Year of the Transition to IPv6

I bet that nobody believed in 1992 that thirty years later, we'd still be discussing the state of the transition to IPv6! In 1992 we were discussing what to do about the forthcoming address crunch in IPv4, and having come to terms with the inevitable prospect that the silicon industry was going to outpace the capacity of the IPv4 address pool in a couple of years, we needed to do something quickly

The Changing Role of IP Addresses in the Architectural Evolution of the Internet

I work at APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry that serves the Asia Pacific Region. APNIC provides common infrastructure services for the region that support the unique assignment of IP address blocks to Internet network operators within our region through the operation of an address registry. In short, IP addresses are what we do. So, when there are discussions in technology circles about evolving the Internet's address model in varying ways,...

The State of RPKI as We Enter 2022

Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is a method to secure internet routing traffic by cryptographically verifying routes. As we begin 2022, we look back at 2021 and see how the year saw another significant step towards its adoption. High-profile issues with the old trust-based model of Border Gateway Protocol, designed several decades ago, have shown the continued importance of protecting popular networks from mistakes or hackers.

The Year 2038 Computer Problem – a Repeat of Y2K?

The Year 2038 Problem relates to representing time in many digital systems as the number of seconds passed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 and storing it as a signed 32-bit integer. Such implementations cannot encode times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. At that time, systems might crash and be unable to restart when the time is changed to that date. It is like the Y2K problem caused by the widespread use of two decimal digits to store the year. While that problem was overhyped...

Big Internet Outages - There Is No Such Thing as a Routine Software Upgrade

Last year I wrote about big disruptive outages on the T-Mobile and the CenturyLink networks. Those outages demonstrate how a single circuit failure on a transport route or a single software error in a data center can spread quickly and cause big outages. I join a lot of the industry in blaming the spread of these outages on the concentration and centralization of networks where the nationwide routing of big networks is now controlled by only a handful of technicians in a few locations. In early October, we saw the granddaddy of all network outages...

Notes from NANOG 83

The network operations community is cautiously heading back into a mode of in-person meetings, and the NANOG meeting at the start of November was a hybrid affair with a mix of in-person and virtual participation, both by the presenters and the attendees. I was one of the virtual mob, and these are my notes from the presentations I found to be of personal interest. I hope you might also find them to be of interest as well... The year 2021 has not been a good year for Internet outages.

Why the Cloud Is the Solution for Telecom Upgrades

With so much "cloud-talk" across every industry -- many presume that every company with serious telecom operations has already moved there -- but they haven't. In fact, 20 to 25% of global companies are still using legacy PBX systems and MPLS networks and waiting to replace them and move over to SD-Wan/mesh solutions. These advancements can be done successfully after an infrastructure audit has been conducted to identify operational weaknesses and threat vulnerabilities and measuring efficiencies of each feature for usage optimization and increased productivity.