Computer networks and the TCP/IP protocol suite continue to evolve. This blog posts highlights some recent news and scientific articles which could be of interest for readers of Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice.

Email

• http://emailhistory.org/ provides an interesting set of links and and mailing list on the history of email on the Internet

DNS

• A closer look at how Dropbox uses DNS to load-balance traffic to their datacenters
• DNSSEC allows to secure more than 100,000 domains in .ch
• A growing number of cloud providers encourage users and application developers to use DNS over TLS (DoT) or DNS over HTTPS (DoH) instead of sending DNS queries over UDP. Both DoT and DoH encrypt the DNS requests and thus provide some protection for the users but DNSSEC is still required if you want to authenticate the DNS responses. While DoT and DoH improve privacy by encrypting information sent to the DNS resolver, it is still possible for attackers to extract information about the domains that are resolved. See Traffic Analysis still possible when using DoT and DoH on APNIC’s blog or Encrypted DNS = Privacy? A Traffic Analysis Perspective presented at NDSS’20.
• Some operators have started to provide DoH and DoT services, see Belnet DNS over HTTPS. If your ISP does not offer this service, contact their helpdesk.

TLS

• After recent discussions on the lifetime of TLS certificates, Apple has decided to enforce a maximum lifetime of 398 days on certificates issued from 1st Sep 2020. This could have a wide impact on the industry
• A closer look at the impact of TLS certificate revocation on the performance of web servers

BGP

• The yearly report on the evolution of the BGP routing tables during 2019
• Autonomous Systems sometimes disappear and their numbers are recycled. AS7007, one of the first ASes to cause massive BGP disruptions due to a configuration error, was on sale by ARIN.

TCP

• An interesting paper presented at PAM and entitled MUST, SHOULD, DON’T CARE: TCP Conformance in the Wild analyses the conformance of TCP implementations in the wild by using active measurements. The Linux stack is the most confirming one, but while conducting the study they interacted with devices that were not conforming and crashed during their tests..

IPv6

• Akamai now generates 21 Tbps of IPv6 traffic
• During FOSDEM 2020 participants could only use IPv6 over Wi-Fi. A detailed blog post summarised the lessons learned from this live network.
• A nice video published by RIPE NCC shows the deployment of IPv6 in many countries
• regular expressions to validate IPv6 addresses

Ethernet

• An interesting summary on why Ethernet uses a 1500 bytes MTU ?

Cellular networks

• A very interesting analysis showing the deployment of 4G networks around the world during the last decade
• As 5G networks have started to be deployed, an interesting post describes everything you need to know about 5G antennas

*This blog post was written to inform the readers of Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice about the evolution of the field. You can subscribe to the Atom feed for this blog.