When did the Internet begin? It all gets a bit hazy after so many years, but by the early 1970s, research work in packet-switched networks was well underway, and while it wasn't running TCP at the time (the flag day when the ARPANET switched over to use TCP was not until 1 January 1983) but there was the base datagram internet protocol running in the early research ARPA network in the US. Given that this is now around 50 years ago, and given that so much has happened in the last 50 years, what does the next 50 years have in store? more
Do you know of someone who has made the Internet better in some way who deserves more recognition? Maybe someone who has helped extend Internet access to a large region? Or wrote widely-used programs that make the Internet more secure? Or served in some capacity behind the scenes in Internet services? Or maybe someone who has been actively working for open standards and open processes for the Internet? more
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a collaborative body that has developed internetworking specifications for more than five decades, successfully shaping the global marketplace of digital network equipment and services. Beginning as a kind of distributed think tank among network researchers in 1969, it evolved to become one of the world's most influential standards bodies. more
One of the basic tools in network design is the so-called "stacked" protocol model. This model was developed in the late 1970s as part of a broader effort to develop general standards and methods of networking. In 1983, the efforts of the CCITT and ISO were merged to form The Basic Reference Model for Open Systems Interconnection, usually referred to as the Open Systems Interconnection Reference Model or the "OSI model." more
Why are networks so insecure? One reason is we don't take network security seriously. We just don't think of the network as a serious target of attack. Or we think of security as a problem "over there," something that exists in the application realm, that needs to be solved by application developers. Or we think the consequences of a network security breach as "well, they can DDoS us, and then we can figure out how to move load around, so if we build with resilience (enough redundancy)... more
We're edging closer every day to seeing WiFi 6 in our homes. WiFi 6 will be bolstered by the newly approved 6 GHz frequency, and the combination of WiFi 6 and 6 GHz spectrum is going to revolutionize home broadband. I don't think many people understand how many of our home broadband woes are caused by current WiFi technology. WiFi has been an awesome technology that freed our homes from long category 5 wires everywhere, but WiFi has a basic flaw that became apparent when homeowners started to buy hordes of WiFi-enabled devices. more
For many years the consuming topic in DNS circles was that of the names themselves. If you wind the clock back twenty years or so, you will find much discussion about the nature of the Internet's namespace. Why were there both generic top-level labels and two-letter country codes? If we were going to persist with these extra-territorial generic country codes in the namespace, then how many should there be? Who could or should manage them? And so on. more
Do you know someone who deserves recognition for launching the Internet in their region or country? Or someone who made some major technical innovation that made the Internet faster or better? Or someone who is a passionate advocate who influenced other people to make the Internet better? Can you think of someone who helped the Internet reach new people? For example, in a new region or language? Do you know someone who made the Internet more inclusive and accessible to more people? more
As the pandemic continues, the network operator community continues to meet online. NANOG held its 81st meeting on February 8 and 9, and these are my notes from some of the presentations at that meeting... Ethernet, developed in 1973 at Xerox PARC, was a revolutionary step in network architectures in many ways. The common bus architecture imposed several constraints on the network that have echoed through the ensuing four decades in all kinds of ways. more
In previous posts in this series, I've discussed a number of applications of cryptography to the DNS, many of them related to the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC). In this final blog post, I'll turn attention to another application that may appear at first to be the most natural, though as it turns out, may not always be the most necessary: DNS encryption. (I've also written about DNS encryption as well as minimization in a separate post on DNS information protection.) more
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