Networks

Another Day, Another Set of Hacking Attacks. News At 11.

While reading Reuters I came across a news article indicating that a number of high profile agencies - from the United Nations to the Canadian Government to government of Taiwan - were broken into over a period of the past five years. ... I'll say it right now, even though I haven't been briefed on it. It was China.

Pentagon Reveals Largest Ever Loss of Defense Data in Cyberattack

The Associated Press published an article today that the Pentagon revealed that earlier this year, they suffered one of its largest ever loss of sensitive data to a foreign government by a cyberattack. ... It's hard to say what's right and what's wrong. On the one hand, the Secretary of Defense says that the cyberwar is very real. On the other hand, the cyberczar Howard Schmidt said that there is no cyberwar and instead government needs to focus its efforts to fight online crime and espionage...

IPv6 Enabled Networks Before and After World IPv6 Day

In our last post on CircleID, Measuring World IPv6 Day - First Impressions, we showed exactly when World IPv6 Day participants switched on IPv6 on their networks (by way of announcing DNS AAAA records). Now, a few weeks after World IPv6 Day, it's interesting to see what the longer-term effects have been.

8 Security Considerations for IPv6 Deployment

Feb. 3, 2011, came and went without much fanfare, but it was a milestone for Internet stakeholders, whether they knew it or not. On that Thursday, the last available IPv4 addresses were allocated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Though some Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) have a reasonable inventory of IP addresses that could last another year or two, the days of "new" IPv4 address allocations are largely over.

RFC 1918 Address Space: Why It Was Needed then and How It Will Change in IPv6!

Recently, my firm has seen a lot of interest come from Enterprises seeking IPAM/DNS tools. We predicted that IPv6 adoption and the need for automation software/tools would follow the Internet ecosystem's supply chain starting with Service Providers consisting of ISPs, I/PaaS, ASPs, then content providers (mostly a service really), then Enterprises, followed by SMBs & Consumers. While good for business, it has also forced us to revisit and think thru many TCP/IP protocol standards...

Using Domain Filtering To Effect IP Address Filtering

In Taking Back The DNS I described new technology in ISC BIND as of Version 9.8.0 that allows a recursive server operator to import DNS filtering rules in what ISC hopes will become the standard interchange format for DNS policy information. Later I had to decry the possible use of this technology for mandated content blocking such as might soon be the law of the land in my country. I'm a guest at MAAWG this week in San Francisco and one of the most useful hallway discussions I've been in so far was about the Spamhaus DROP list.

Two Stage Filtering for IPv6 Electronic Mail

I'm a guest at the MAAWG conference in San Francisco this week and several people have now mentioned to me the problem and the opportunity of anti-spam e-mail filtering for IPv6. Tomorrow is World IPv6 Day but since a bunch of the pieces have clicked together in my head I'll post this a day early.

DHCP for IPv4 vs. IPv6 - What You Need to Know

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is a protocol intended to enable machines (servers, game consols, etc) wishing to be "online" the ability to request Internet Protocol information from a DHCP server automatically. ... In this article we will begin to outline some of the fundamental differences between DHCPv4 and DHCPv6, explore historical uses of DHCPv4 and how those concepts will adapt/change in IPv6.

What is Internet Protocol Address Management?”

The number of web-based devices is expanding at an exponential clip, virtualization is making a very static environment dynamic, and now with the exhaustion of IPv4 and the oncoming complexities of IPv6 network operators must reevaluate what IP Address Management (IPAM) really is. The goal of this post is to define the various functions that make up IP Address Management.

Anycast, Unicast, or Both?

A long time ago in an Internet far away, nobody paid for DNS services. Not directly at least. We either ran our own servers, or got DNS service as part of our IP transit contract, or traded services with others. In ~1990 I was the operator of one of the largest name servers in existence (UUCP-GW-1.PA.DEC.COM) and I exchanged free DNS secondary service with UUNET. Two thousand zones seemed like a lot of zones back then -- little did we dream that there would some day be a billion or so DNS zones world wide.