In this episode of PING, Verisign Fellow Duane Wessels discusses notable changes in the DNS root zone over the last 13 years.Duane joined Verisign in the early stages of DNSSEC deployment and has conducted measurements of DNS for many years, in his measurement factory days, and in DNS OARC as well as inside Verisign. The significant changes to the DNS root zone, and it's implications for the root zone operators are discussed: Deploying DNSSEC, the first DNSSEC KSK key changes, the increase in...

In this episode of PING, APNIC's Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the question of buffers, flow control and 'efficient' use of a network link.How do we maximise the use of a given network path, without knowing everything about its size along the way? It turns out, the story isn't as simple as "more is better" because sometimes, adding more memory to the system adds delay. Modern TCP's flow control algorithms are being modified to react to delay as well as loss, and become more efficient...

In this episode of PING, Dr Romain Fontugne, the deputy director of research at IIJ Labs in Tokyo discusses the IIJ "Internet Health Report" and AS Hegemony (or network centrality) in particular.This is a data model they have been working on for some time (6 years now) which exposes dependencies between ASs in BGP, both directly (as in customer-cone) and indirectly through transitive dependencies. It's a fascinating insight into how BGP dependencies can be seen through the state of the...

In this episode of PING, APNIC's Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communications and the amazing effects they are having on internet reach worldwide.Read more about the issues in LEO (https://blog.apnic.net/tag/leo/) and satellite communications (https://blog.apnic.net/tag/satellites/) on the APNIC Blog.Here's some recent articles of note:* Getting hands-on experience with Starlink...

In this episode of PING, Dr Rolf Winter (https://blog.apnic.net/author/rolf-winters/), the Professor of Data Communications at Augsburg University of Applied Sciences (https://www.hs-augsburg.de/en/) discusses his work on ‘reverse traceroute’, which is an approach to using the well-known traceroute (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traceroute) mechanism but driven from the other end.The inherent problem with traceroute and its related diagnostics is that it only informs you about the path...

In this episode of PING, APNIC's Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses DNSSEC and presents a case "for" and "against" deployment, in the context of complexity, fragility, and impact on the DNS process at large. DNSSEC is net beneficial but its by no means automatic to deploy it protecting a zone.Read more about the issues in DNSSEC deployment on the APNIC Blog:* to DNSSEC or not? (https://blog.apnic.net/2023/02/20/opinion-to-dnssec-or-not/) (Geoff Huston...

In this episode of PING, Andre Geldeblom from APNIC product development (https://blog.apnic.net/author/andregelderblom/)discusses how APNIC is measuring user experience, satisfaction and engagement with the "Orbit" (https://orbit.apnic.net/news-feed/)system we deployed to provide web services integrated with email.Andre discusses the different motivations and mechanisms we're using at APNIC to understand "UX" and how this integrates in our planning to deliver "value for money" to the APNIC...

In this episode of PING, APNIC's Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the current situation in BGP across IPv4 and IPv6. Historically. we've met the "running out of memory" problem with incremental upgrades but things have now come to a place where "simply adding more memory" may not be the answer, and the dynamics of BGP growth appear to have changed. Geoff explores the changing surface of the BGP default-free zone, and what it means for routing technology and the ISPRead more about the...

In this episode of PING, Ege Cem Kirci from ETH Zurich discusses his IMC paper on users perceptions of internet outages, measured using Google Trends. This was presented at the IMC conference held in NIce, France in October 2022.Ege and his co-authors have been exploring the relationship of Internet outages, (for example caused by weather events) and the information in google trends, with a mechanism to combine snapshots of data by time period which auto-scale, to a single unified time...

In this episode of PING, APNIC's Chief Scientist Geoff Huston explores how APNIC Labs has been able to look inside behaviour in the DNS, to see signs of the "centrality" problem: How much concentration of delivery of service is there, across different market segments of users, and between the supply side (name serving as an authority) and and request side (recursive resolvers)Read more about the APNIC Labs measurement of DNS:* Looking at Centrality in the DNS...

In this episode of PING, Luuk Hendricks and Willem Toorop from NLNet talk about their work to embed telemetry in the linux kernel using eXpress Data Path (XDP)Read more about XDP in a series of articles published in the APNIC blog:* Journeying into XDP: Part 0* Journeying into XDP: Augmenting the DNS* Journeying into XDP: Fully-fledged DNS service augmentation* Journeying into XDP: Augmenting the DNSand their blog covering this episode of Ping:* Journeying into XDP: XDPerimenting with DNS...

In this episode of PING, APNIC's Chief Scientist Geoff Huston talks through some of the presentations he saw (and gave) at the recent DNS OARC 39 meeting held in Belgrade.Read more about DNS OARC and the presentations mentioned:* DNS OARC (https://www.dns-oarc.net)* Casey Deccio's presentation on DITL data and vulnerabilities (https://indico.dns-oarc.net/event/44/contributions/956/attachments/922/1697/2022-10-22-resolversec-oarc.pdf)* Geoff Huston's presentation on resolverless DNS...

In this episode of PING, Juan Garcia Pardo from ETH Zurich discusses the Cooperative Lightweight Inter-domain Bandwidth-Reservation Infrastructure (COLIBRI) project for the SCION network, last discussed in episode 18 of PING.Juan explores the motivations for setting up a bandwidth reservation framework, and how it might be used in practice.Read more about COLIBRI and SCION:* The SCION network architecture (https://www.scion-architecture.net/)* The SCION Inter-domain Routing Architecture. From...

APNIC's Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, joins PING for his monthly chat, to share his thoughts on the associated trust with routing security and whether it can hold up as a sustainable model.We'll talk about the history of trust in communication and associated challenges within routing security and the rise and future of Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) and BGP security.Read more about PKI and routing security on the APNIC Blog:* What’s going on with certificate revocation?...

At the recent APNIC 54 meeting (https://conference.apnic.net/54/), we sat down with local keynote speaker Alexander Ling (https://conference.apnic.net/54/program/speakers/#/alexander-ling), Director of Singapore's Quantum Engineering Programme, in his offices at the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technologies.In this episode, Alex will give us a brief 101 on quantum networking — given it may be a relatively new concept for many of you, even though it's been in...

APNIC's Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, joins PING for his monthly chat, to warn the service provider industry about pressuring regulators to make content providers pay to use their networks; a situation currently playing out in Korea as we chatted about in Episode 13.Korea v. Content Provider: When the customer isn’t always rightAs he outlines in his recent post (https://blog.apnic.net/2022/09/09/sender-pays/), Geoff forecasts the consequences of turning our backs on net neutrality which...

APNIC's Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, joins PING for his monthly chat, to warn the service provider industry about pressuring regulators to make content providers pay to use their networks; a situation currently playing out in Korea as we chatted about in Episode 13.Korea v. Content Provider: When the customer isn’t always rightAs he outlines in his recent post (https://blog.apnic.net/2022/09/09/sender-pays/), Geoff forecasts the consequences of turning our backs on net neutrality which...

In this episode, we’re returning to a topic that we last discussed in Episode 20, with Robin Marx, and unpacking the intricacies and perceived complexities of the QUIC and other similar new protocols.To help, we’ve invited Larry Peterson and Bruce Davie, who among their extensive list of experience spanning the past thirty years, are co-authors of the renowned ‘Computer Networks: A Systems Approach’ textbook, which is now in its fifth edition and open source.Check out the Systems Approach...

APNIC's Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, joins PING for his month chat, to share his thoughts on discussions at the recent meeting (https://notes.ietf.org/notes-ietf-114-dinrg#) of the Decentralized Internet Infrastructure Research Group (DINRG) at IETF 114.The DINRG investigates open research issues in decentralizing infrastructure services such as trust management, identity management, name resolution, resource/asset ownership management, and resource discovery with a focus on infrastructure...

In this episode, we chat with Anant Shah, Principal Architect at Edgecast, about the challenges with measuring video streaming quality of experience. We'll discuss the fundamentals of video streaming, including the protocols, how it is delivered and different vantage points from which it can be measured.Understanding the challenges associated with delivering and measuring content can provide insight into how we need to improve observability in the Internet as a whole as well as how we can...

APNIC's Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston joins us again on the show, this time to discuss three related presentations by Google, ISC and Mozilla that caught his attention during the recent IETF 114 and DNS-OARC 38 meetings on securing the DNS against spoofing.DNS spoofing involves third parties intercepting and responding to queries for benign or malicious purposes; recent studies show that DNS spoofing has more doubled since 2016...

We’re continuing the theme of our last episode and learning more about the intricacies and perceived complexities of the QUIC protocol from one of its contributors and proponents Robin Marx, a web protocol postdoc researcher at KULeuven in Belgium and soon-to-be technical solutions architect at Akamai.Having researched HTTP2 performance as part of his PhD, Robin became involved in the development of HTTP3 and QUIC in the IETF while they were being designed. He also created the popular QUIC...

In this episode, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston joins us to discuss a new measurement project (https://blog.apnic.net/2022/07/11/a-look-at-quic-use/) that he and his APNIC Labs colleague Joao Damas (https://blog.apnic.net/author/joao-luis-silva-damas/) have established to measure the use and performance of the QUIC protocol (RFC 9000).Although QUIC has only recently been standardized by the IETF (May 2021), it has been around since 2012 with an initial public release included in...

Today’s Internet is a Frankenstein’s monster of parts that have been bolted together. If it was a house, it would be a knock-down job — far easier to start from scratch.This is easier said than done or so many thought as we’ll come to learn in this episode featuring Nicola Rustignoli (https://blog.apnic.net/author/nicola-rustignoli/) a founding engineer at the SCION Association, which is taking a clean-slate approach to overcoming the architectural limitations of today’s Internet, to provide...

In this episode, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, joins us to discuss IPv6 — a topic he has investigated exhaustively over the last 30 years.Specifically, we’re talking about the seemingly never-ending transition to IPv6, the hallmarks it shares with previous IP transitions, how Network Address Translation (NAT) has hindered its deployment for the good and bad of the Internet, and whether 100% IPv6 is even the end goal given how far technology has come since IP was first implemented.You...