The internet bus continues to accelerate straight into the IPv4 address depletion wall with spirited discussions continuing on how to divvy up the remnants of the address space. Obviously all five Regional Internet Registries (RIR's) want to make sure they get their fair share from IANA but what is a fair share remains the subject of interpretation. In the mean time, scenarios of a speculative land rush and auctions of ever smaller address blocks abound with unattractive consequences such as an explosion of the size of the routing table and a stunted growth of the global internet economy... In the meantime, the airline industry completed a rather significant migration of their own... more
The folks at Renesys pointed out earlier this week some interesting activity surrounding the L-root name server, highlighting some activity that should give us all yet another reason to be concerned about the security and integrity of the Internet DNS... considering that a great deal of malware today tends to corrupt the DNS resolution path in order to further exploit compromised end-systems, and that corruption, or any other actual end-system compromise, might well be unnecessary if the root were compromised -- well, think of the possibilities! more
"The world is flattening," says Dave Rubal at the FOSE Conference and Exhibition this week in Washington, DC. "The race for IT dominance is on, and it is coming west." Mr. Rubal, Cisco's Worldwide Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) Task Force Lead, spoke of the tremendous race in IT dominance that is occurring, stating that the "mainstay technologies at the Beijing Olympics will be IPv6-powered." IPv6 is in line to replace version 4, but Rubal hinted that China and other Far East countries may be adopting the new version faster than the United States... more
As most CAUCE supporters already know, forging 'From:' or other commonly seen email headers is trivially easy. It's one of the most frustrating oversights in the creation of Internet email technology -- though of course that's only obvious in hindsight; it was just fine for the pre-Internet networks of the late 1970s and early-mid 1980s. Since then, things have changed -- and the most interesting recent technological advancements in email have been in the realm of sender authentication, which encompasses ways to verify that the apparent sender of a message actually is the entity which sent it. more
The Internet Architecture Board's (IAB) chair, Olaf Kolkman, asked the members of the IAB to provide a statement paper each on what they believe the current most pressing issues in terms of Internet architecture are... I have thought about this for the past few days, and realised that it's hard to come up with overarching issues and even harder to come up with issues, where the IAB actually could make a difference. But I came with up with two issues. more
In this article we'd like to look at some measures of the use of IPv4 and IPv6 protocols in today's Internet and see if we can draw any conclusions about just how far down the track we are with the IPv6 part of dual stack deployment. We'll use a number of measurements that have been made consistently since 1 January 2004 to the present, where we can distinguish between the relative levels of IPv4 and IPv6 use in various ways. more
I've posted to SSRN my paper on why most telecom companies, even though they operate networks, don't appreciate the fundamental business dynamics of network structures. This will be a chapter in a book Wharton is publishing on network-based strategies and competencies. In the paper, I describe two views on telecom and Internet infrastructure... more
The main reason for developing a new internet protocol was based on lack of address; however this was not the only reason. Unfortunately, many people think of IPv6 only as enormous address space, but there are a lot of other advantages, for example... authorizations and authentication function are implemented directly in the protocol and are mandatory... automatic configuration of network interfaces based on their physical address... protocol itself recognizes data streams which must be transmitted in real time, and the data must be processed with highest priority... more
It happened in San Jose, it happened in Taiwan and soon it will happen in Philadelphia! A nightmare? A conspiracy? No, no, it was just the IPv6 hour. One hour of pure IPv6 LAN for NANOG attendees with a NAT-PT as valve to the crowded teeming world of the IPv4 internet... At 12 noon, Tuesday February 19th it happened! While Mac, Vista, Linux and Unix can breathe AAAA, Windows XP however cannot do DNS over IPv6 transport. What to do to avoid all these Windows XP users... more
The debates are raging over whether or not we should migrate to IPv6. The strongest argument is the enormous address space that will allow for everyone and everything to have a unique public address, many addresses actually. It is often said that the shortage of public IPv4 addresses has limited our capabilities because it led to the pervasive use of private addressing, Network Address Translation (NAT) and Port Address Translation (PAT). Though these technologies remain critical, they are often regarded as stop-gap measures, and they sometimes create problems. In some circles, NAT has acquired a very bad name. But is that a fair perspective of the technology? Let's review the positives and negatives. more
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