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 H…

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 co…

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…

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, s…

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. ISO…

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 I…

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…

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 n…

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 Na…

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 …

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 intermedia…

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 i…

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. Acro…

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 cla…

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 Paki…

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 l…

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 pe…

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 tr…

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 a…

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 …

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…

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 makin…

This time on PING, Philip Paeps from the FreeBSD Cluster Administrators and Security teams discusses their approach to systems monitoring and measurement. Its eMail. “Short podcast” you say, but no, there’s a wealth of war-stories and “why” to explore in this episode. We caught up at the APNIC57/APRICOT meeting held in Bangkok in February of 2024. …

In his regular monthly spot on PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the question of subnet structure, looking into the APNIC Labs measurement data which collects around 8 million discrete IPv6 addresses per day, worldwide. Subnets are a concept which "came along for the ride" in the birth of Internet Protocol, and were baked into th…

This time on PING Doug Madory from Kentik discusses his recent measurements of the RPKI system worldwide, and it's visible impact on the stability and security of BGP. Doug makes significant use of the Oregon RouteViews repository of BGP data, a collection maintained continuously at the University of Oregon for decades. It includes data from back t…

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses Starlink again, and the ability of modern TCP flow control algorithms to cope with the highly variant loss and delay seen over this satellite network. Geoff has been doing more measurements using starlink terminals in Australia and the USA, at different times of day exploring t…

This time on PING, Dr Mona Jaber from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), discusses her work exploring IoT, Digital Twins and Social Science led research in the field of networking and telecommunications. Dr Jaber is a senior lecturer in QMUL and is the founder and director of the Digital Twins for Sustainable Development Goals (DT4SDG) at QMUL…

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the European Union's consideration of taking a role in the IETF, as itself. Network engineers, policy makers and scientists from all around the world have participated in IETF but this is the first time an entity like the EU has considered participation as itself in the process…

This time on PING we have Phil Regnauld from DNS Operations Analysis & Resource Center (DNS-OARC) talking about the three distinct faces OARC presents to the community. Phil came to the OARC presidents role, replacing Keith Mitchell who was the founding president since 2008 through to this year. Phil previously has worked with the Network Startup R…

In this episode of PING, APNICs Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses a new proposed DNS resource record called DELEG. The record is being designed to aid in managing where a DNS zone is delegated. Delegation is the primary mechanism used in the DNS to separate responsibility between child and parent for a given domain name. The DELEG RR is design…

This time on PING we have Amreesh Phokeer from the Internet Society (ISOC) talking about a system they operate called Pulse, available at https://pulse.internetsociety.org/. Pulse’s purpose is to assess the “resiliency” of the Internet in a given locality. Similar systems we have discussed before on Ping include APNIC’s DASH service, aimed at resou…

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the role of DNS in directing where your applications connect to, and where content comes from. Although this more “steering” traffic than it “routing” in the strict sense of IP packet forwarding, (that’s still the function of the border gateway protocol or BGP) It does in fact …

In this episode of PING, Leslie Daigle from the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) discusses their honeynet project, measuring bad traffic internet-wide. This was originally focussed on IoT devices with the AIDE project but is clearly more generally informative. Leslie also discusses the quad-nine DNS service, GCA’s domain trust work and the MANRS project…

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the change in IP packet fragmentation behaviour adopted by IPv6, and the implications of a change in IETF “Normative Language” regarding use of IPv6 in the DNS. IPv4 arguably succeeds over so many variant underlying links and networks because it’s highly adaptable to fragmentat…

In this episode of PING, Sara Dickinson from Sinodun Internet Technologies and Terry Manderson, VP, Information Security and Network Engineering at ICANN discuss the ICANN DNS stats collector system which ICANN commissioned, and Sinodun wrote for them. This system consists of two parts, a DNS stats compactor framework which captures data in the C-D…

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the rise of Low Earth Orbiting (LEO) Satellite based Internet, and the consequences for end-to-end congestion control in TCP and related protocols. Modern TCP has mostly been tuned for constant delay, low loss paths and performs very well at balancing bandwidth amongst the coop…

In this episode of PING, Verisign fellow Duane Wessels discusses a late state (version 08) Internet draft he’s working on with two colleagues from Verisign. The draft is on Negative Caching of DNS Resolution Failures and is co-authored by Duane, William Carroll, and Matt Thomas This episode discusses the behaviour of the DNS system overall in the f…

In this episode of PING, instead of a conversation with APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston we’ve got a panel session from APNIC56 he facilitated, where Geoff and six guests got to discuss the 30 year history of APNIC. With Geoff on the panel were: Professor Jun Murai known as the ‘father of the Internet’ in Japan. In 1984, he developed the Japan …

In this episode of PING, Stephen Song discusses his work mapping the Internet. This is a long-term project, which he carries out alongside and supported by Mozilla Corporation, and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC). Stephen has long championed the case for Open Data in telecommunications decision-making and maintains a list of re…

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the technique APNIC Labs uses to measure end user behaviour in the global internet. This is probably the only worldwide web advert based measurement system in continuous use since 2010. Originally written in Adobe Flash, the system is now coded in Javascript and HTML5, and cont…

In june of this year, the Dashboard for AS Health or DASH, a service operated by APNIC saw a leak of approximately 260,000 BGP routes from a vantage point in Singapore, and sent alerts to around 90 subscribers to our routing mis-alignment notification service which is part of DASH. BGP is the state of announcements made and heard worldwide, calcula…

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the coming future of VLSI with Moores law coming to an end. This was motivated by a key presentation made at the most recent ANRW session at IETF117, San Francisco. For over 5 decades we have been able to rely on an annual, latterly bi-annual doubling of speed called Moore's La…

In this episode of PING Jaap Akkerhuis (NLNet Labs), Ulrich Spiedel (University of Auckland) and Russ White (Juniper) discuss the issues behind Sunspots, ionisation in the atmosphere and its effects on satellite communications and terrestrial infrastructure based on wires in the air: Power grids and data services. In two blogs Good day sunshine and…

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the eternal tension between content and carriage. At the RIPE 86 meeting held in Rotterdam in May of this year, Rudolf van der Berg presented a talk titled "The EU Gigabit Connectivity Package and How It Will Hurt the Internet" Geoff has looked at the tensions between content a…

In this episode of PING, Verisign fellow Duane Wessels presents the ZONEMD resource record, defined in RFC8976. The “MD” in ZONEMD stands for “message digest” and this resource record (RR) is a checksum over the state of a zone, including all its records and the zone serial record (“start of authority” or SOA) which includes a serial number. This m…

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses how Sweden built a national time distribution system and the nature of time in the modern Internet. At the RIPE86 Meeting held in Rotterdam in May of this year, Karin Ahl, the CEO of Netnod presented a talk titled “How Sweden Built a World-Leading Time Network” A central proble…

In this episode of PING, Christian Huitema discusses how looking into the IETF data tracker allowed him to assess "how well we are doing" at document production. As the IETF has grown, and as the process of developing standards has got more complex its understandable it takes a bit longer to produce a viable RFC but some questions have been made ab…

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the major themes from his recent blog on “Failed Expectations” In a trip down memory lane, the podcast ranges over the 40 year plus history of how we came to have the current Internet as we know it, and some of the “road not taken” alternates which were under consideration at t…

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…

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 m…