Using a single IP address to provide both identity and location information can create challenges and inefficiencies in network design. In this History of Networking episode, we sit down with Saleem Bhatti to talk about the history of ILNP and IP mobility to see how this tech aims to resolve this challenge. Outro Music: Danger…
The little green lock—now being deprecated by some browsers—provides some level of comfort for many users when entering personal information on a web site. You probably know the little green lock means the traffic between the host and the site is encrypted, but you might not stop to ask the fundamental question of all cryptography:…
One of the great fears of server virtualization is the concern around copying information from one virtual machine, or one container, to another, through some cover channel across the single processor. This kind of channel would allow an attacker who roots, or otherwise is able to install software, on one of the two virtual machines,…
Disaggregation, in the form of splitting network hardware from network software, is often touted as a way to save money (as if network engineering were primarily about saving money, rather than adding value—but this is a different soap box). The primary connections between disaggregation and saving money are the ability to deploy white boxes, and…
Many network engineers find the entire world of telecom to be confusing—especially as papers are peppered with a lot of acronyms. If any part of the networking world is more obsessed with acronyms than any other, the telecom world, where the traditional phone line, subscriber access, and network engineering collide, reigns as the “king of…
Recently, Bert Hubert wrote of a growing problem in the networking world: the complexity of DNS. We have two systems we all use in the Internet, DNS and BGP. Both of these systems appear to be able to handle anything we can throw at them and “keep on ticking.” this article was crossposted to CircleID…
Policing traffic and shaping traffic are two completely different things, but it is hard to know, in the wild, what the impact of one or the other will have on a particular traffic flow, or on the performance of applications in general. While the paper under review here, An Internet-Wide Analysis of Traffic Policing, is…
On this episode of the history of networking, we talk to Tony Li about the origin and history of the Cisco Silicon Switching Engine.