In Don’t Forget to Lock the Back Door! A Characterization of IPv6 Network Security Policy, the authors ran an experiment that tested for open ports in IPv4 and IPv6 across a wide swath of the network. What they discovered was interesting— IPv6 is more open than IPv4. A given IPv6 port is nearly always more…
Assume, for a moment, that you have a configuration something like this— Some host, A, is sending queries to, and receiving responses from, a database at C. An observer, B, has access to the packets on the wire, but neither the host nor the server. All the information between the host and the server is…
One interesting trend of the last year or two is the rising use of data analytics and ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) in solving network engineering problems. Several ideas (and/or solutions) were presented this year at the IETF meeting in Seoul; this post takes a look at one of these. To lay the groundwork, botnets are…
Spam might seem like an annoyance in the US and other areas where bandwidth is paid for by the access rate—and what does spam have to do with BGP security? In many areas of the world, however, spam makes email practically unusable. When you’re paying for Internet access by the byte transmitted or received, spam…
The universal scaling law is a model designed to help engineers understand transaction based systems, particularly databases and applications. What could a transaction based system have to do with network design? After all, networks aren’t really transaction based, are they? Or maybe they are… Let’s ignore the data flowing through the network for a moment…
Edge provider networks, supporting DSL, voice, and other services to consumers and small businesses, tend to be more heavily bound by vendor specific equipment and hardware centric standards. These networks are built around the more closed telephone standards, rather than the more open internetworking standards, and hence they tend to be more expensive to operate…
While it is true that huge scale is a different mindset, and not just “more of the same only bigger,” there are also a lot of lessons to learn by looking at how truly large scale networks are built. In this vein, Google released a paper explaining the evolution of their network. While the hardware…
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