DNS and security

Here are some of our thoughts on DNS and its security challenges. New encrypted DNS query protocols (DNS over HTTPS, RFC 8484) help but at the same time we also need to be concerned about how much information we're sharing with DNS resolution infrastructure. This is a good example of where communications security alone is not necessarily going to solve all problems.

Ericsson: "DNS Security and why it's time for change"

Covid-19 and the Internet

This is a great article on some of the things that we take today for granted. Imagine if we had run into the Coronavirus crisis in the 1980s, and even the libraries would have closed! It would have been quite a different experience, and none of us would be able to do the work-from-home that we are now doing.

But, the really interesting bit is the technical architecture that allows the network to take such immense growth and swings in usage patterns, as it has in the last few decades, and is now experiencing rapidly during the crisis. The distributed, bottom-up collaborative design, adaptivity, support for wildly different traffic situations, and hard work & plenty of equipment to support the massive use of Internet today all played a role. We need to build on this even further.

New York Times: "Your Internet is working. Thank these Cold War-era pioneers who designed it to handle almost anything"

Zürich QUIC Interop

QUIC interop and meeting in Zürich, at the Google offices (thanks Brian etc!) There are 15 implementations to test with the other 15 and for each test,19 main features to look at. That's a lot of tests but given the role of these implementations in various operating systems and network equipment, it also needs to work :-) From my point of view this feels more focused on the corner cases than before, so maybe the effort is nearing the end. Although there's probably error cases of the corner cases to still look at :-)

No batteries, no shower

No batteries, no shower.

One of the not so good purchases ... an electrically operated shower controller. It may run out of power during holidays, in which case one can't take a shower, and the large batteries aren't available in all stores. It also takes several seconds to turn the shower up or down. And the battery holder design turns out to be leaky.

The only good feature of this design is that it does automatically cut off after five minutes, so there's protection against passing-out-in-shower-and-causing-flood. Also, the shower doesn't send data to anyone for better targeting of advertisements. As far as I know.

Photos and text (c) 2019 by Jari Arkko. All rights reserved.

Automated driving... very safe

LinkedIn occasionally sends advertisements for jobs, and today's advertisement caught my attention: someone is looking for software engineers to work on automated driving. The interest part: only 1 year of experience required.

Hopefully the automated driving systems will be built also with some more experienced software engineers...

Spindump

This week we are in the QUIC interop in Tokyo, working on the new transport protocol that promises to speed up your connections. Or it may already be doing so :-) And since this is the IETF, running code feels more important than just the specs. Marcus Ihlar and I from Ericsson brought our new latency monitoring tool to the the interop. It performs passive, in-network monitoring of connections or sets of connections, without having to peek into the traffic content itself. It supports TCP, QUIC with the Spin bit, COAP, and few other types of traffic.

The software is open source and available here.

Some more thoughts about why QUIC is important can also be found here.

39,000 ft above Siberia

39,000 ft above Siberia seems like a good place to work on latency measurement tech.

Photos (c) 2019 by Jari Arkko. All rights reserved.