PING

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, discusses the root zone of the DNS, and some emerging concerns in how much it costs to service query load at the root. In the absence of cacheing, all queries in the DNS (except ones the DNS system you ask is locally authoritative for anyway) have to be sent through the root of the DNS, to find the right nameserver to ask for the spec...

In this episode of PING, We’re talking to Leslie Daigle from the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) again, discussing GCA’s honeynet project. Leslie spoke with PING back in January 2024, and in this episode we re-visit things. Honeynets (or Honey farms) are deliberately weakly protected systems put online, to see what kinds of bad traffic exist out in the global Internet, where they come from and what ki...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, revisits changes underway in how the Domain Name System (DNS) delegates authority over a given zone and how resolvers discover the new authoritative sources. We last explored this in March 2024.  In DNS, the word ‘domain’ refers to a scope of authority. Within a domain, everything is governed by its delegated authority. While that au...

In this episode of PING, Professor Cristel Pelsser who holds the chair of critical embedded systems at UCLouvain Discusses her work measuring BGP and in particular the system described in the 2024 SIGCOMM “best paper” award winning research: “The Next Generation of BGP Data Collection Platforms” Cristel and her collaborators Thomas Alfroy, Thomas Holterbach, Thomas Krenc and K. C. Claffy have buil...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, discusses the history and emerging future of how Internet protocols get more than the apparent link bandwidth by using multiple links and multiple paths. Initially, the model was quite simple, capable of handling up to four links of equal cost and delay reasonably well, typically to connect two points together. At the time, the Intern...

Last month, during APRICOT 2025 / APNIC 59, the Internet Society hosted its first Pulse Internet Measurement Forum (PIMF). PIMF brings together people interested in Internet measurement from a wide range of perspectives — from technical details to policy, governance, and social issues. The goal is to create a space for open discussion, uniting both technologists and policy experts. In this second...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, discusses the surprisingly vexed question of how to say ‘no’ in the DNS. This conversation follows a presentation by Shumon Huque at the recent DNS OARC meeting, who will be on PING in a future episode talking about another aspect of the DNS protocol. You would hope this is a simple, straightforward answer to a question, but as usual...

At the APRICOT/APNIC59 meeting held in Petaling Jaya in Malaysia last month, The internet society held it's first PIMF meeting. PIMF, or the Pulse Internet Measurement Forum is a gathering of people interested in Internet measurement in the widest possible sense, from technical information all the way to policy, governance and social questions. ISOC is interested in creating a space for the discus...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston explores bgp "Zombies" which are routes which should have been removed, but are still there. They're the living dead of routes. How does this happen? Back in the early 2000s Gert Döring in the RIPE NCC region was collating a state of BGP for IPv6 report, and knew each of the 300 or so IPv6 announcements directly. He understood what sho...

In this episode, Job Snijders discusses RPKIViews, his long term project to collect the "views" of RPKI state every day, and maintain an archive of BGP route validation states. The project is named to reflect route views, the long-standing archive of BGP state maintained by the University of Oregon, which has been discussed on PING. Job is based in the Netherlands, and has worked in BGP routing fo...

In his first episode of PING for 2025, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston returns to the Domain Name System (DNS) and explores the many faces of name servers behind domains. Up at the root, (the very top of the namespace, where all top-level domains like .gov or .au or .com are defined to exist) there is a well established principle of 13 root nameservers. Does this mean only 13 hosts worldwide...

Welcome back to PING, at the start of 2025. In this episode, Gautam Akiwate, (now with Apple, but at the time of recording with Stanford University) talks about the 2021 Advanced Network Research Prize winning paper, co-authored with Stefan Savage, Geoffrey Voelker and Kimberly Claffy which was titled "Risky BIZness: Risks Derived from Registrar Name Management". The paper explores a situation whi...

In the last episode of PING for 2024, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the shift from existing public-private key cryptography using the RSA and ECC algorithms to the world of ‘Post Quantum Cryptography. These new algorithms are designed to withstand potential attacks from large-scale quantum computers and are capable of implementing Shor’s algorithm, a theoretical approach for using...

This time on PING, Peter Thomassen from SSE and DEsec.io discusses his analysis of the failure modes of CDS and CDNSKEY records between parent and child in the DNS. These records are used to provide in-band signalling of the DS record, fundamental to the maintenance of a secure path from the trust anchor to the delegation through all the intermediate parent and grandparent domains. Many people use...

In his regular monthly spot on PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the slowdown in worldwide IPv6 uptake. Although within the Asia-Pacific footprint we have some truly remarkable national statistics, such as India which is now over 80% IPv6 enabled by APNIC Labs measurements, And Vietnam which is not far behind on 70% the problem is that worldwide, adjusted for population and cons...

In this episode of PING, Vanessa Fernandez and Kavya Bhat, two students from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK) discuss the student led, multi-year project to deploy IPv6 at their campus. Kavya & Vanessa have just graduated, and are moving into their next stages of work and study in computer sciences and network engineering. Across 2023 and 2024 they were able to attend IETF118...

In his regular monthly spot on PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, discusses a large pool of IPv4 addresses left in the IANA registry, from the classful allocation days back in the mid 1980s. This block, from 240.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255 encompasses 268 million hosts, which is a significant chunk of address space: it's equivalent to 16 class-A blocks, each of 16 million hosts. Seems a sha...

In this episode of PING, Nowmay Opalinski from the French Institute of Geopolitics at Paris 8 University discusses his work on resilience, or rather the lack of it, confronting the Internet in Pakistan. As discussed in his blog post, Nowmay and his colleagues at the French Institute of Geopolitics (IFG), University Paris 8, and LUMS University Pakistan used a combination of technical measurement f...

In his regular monthly spot on PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, discusses another use of DNS Extensions: The EDNS0 Client Subnet option (RFC 7871). This feature, though flagged in its RFC as a security concern, can help route traffic based on the source of a DNS query. Without it, relying only on the IP address of the DNS resolver can lead to incorrect geolocation, especially when the...

In this episode of PING, Joao Damas from APNIC Labs explores the mechanics of the Labs measurement system. Commencing over a decade ago, with an "actionscript" (better known as flash) mechanism, backed by a static ISC Bind DNS configuration cycling through a namespace, the Labs advertising measurement system now samples over 15 million end users per day, using Javascript and a hand crafted DNS sys...

In his regular monthly spot on PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston re-visits the question of DNS Extensions, in particular the EDNS0 option signalling maximum UDP packet size accepted, and it’s effect in the modern DNS. Through the APNIC Labs measurement system Geoff has visibility of the success rate for DNS events where EDNS0 signalling triggers DNS “truncation” and the consequent re-quer...

In this episode of PING, Caspar Schutijser and Ralph Koning from SIDN Labs in the Netherlands discuss their post-quantum testbed project. As mentioned in the previous PING episode about Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) in DNSSEC with Peter Thomassen from SSE and Jason Goertzen from Sandbox AQ it's vital we understand how this technology shift will affect real-world DNS systems in deployment. The SI...

In his regular monthly spot on PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston continues his examination of DNSSEC. In the first part of this two-part story, Geoff explored the problem space, with a review of the comparative failure of DNSSEC to be deployed by zone holders, and the lack of validation by the resolvers. This is visible to APNIC labs from carefully crafted DNS zones with validly and inval...

This time on PING, Peter Thomassen from deSEC and Jason Goertzen from Sandbox AQ discuss their research project on post quantum cryptography in DNSSEC, funded by NLNet Labs. Post Quantum cryptography is a response to the risk that a future quantum computer will be able to implement Shor's Algorithm -a mechanism to uncover the private key in the RSA public-private key cryptographic mechanism, as we...

In his regular monthly spot on PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses DNSSEC and it's apparent failure to deploy at scale in the market after 30 years: Both as the state of signed zone uptake (the supply side) and the low levels of verification seen by DNS client users (the consumption side) there is a strong signal DNSSEC isn't making way, compared to the uptake of TLS which is now...