Geoff Huston
Geoff Huston is the Chief Scientist at APNIC, where he undertakes research on topics associated with Internet infrastructure, IP technologies, and address distribution policies. From 1995 to 2005, Geoff was the Chief Internet Scientist at Telstra, where he provided a leading role in the construction and further development of Telstra's Internet service offerings, both in Australia and as part of Telstra's global operations. Prior to Telstra, Mr Huston worked for the Australian National University, where he led the initial construction of the Internet in Australia in the late 1980s as the Technical Manager of the Australian Academic and Research Network.
He has authored a number of books dealing with IP technology, as well as numerous papers and columns. He was a member of the Internet Architecture Board from 1999 until 2005 and served as its Executive Director from 2001 to 2005. He is an active member of the Internet Engineering Task Force, where he currently chairs two Working Groups. He served on the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society from 1992 until 2001 and served a term as Chair of the Board in 1999. He has served on the Board of the Public Internet Registry and also on the Executive Council of APNIC. He chaired the Internet Engineering and Planning Group from 1992 until 2005.
Pages created by Geoff Huston
DNS Privacy
The DNS is normally a relatively open protocol that smears its data (which is your data and mine too!) far and wide. Little wonder that the DNS is used in many ways, not just as a mundane name resolution protocol, but as a data channel for surveillance and as a common means of implementing various forms of content access control. But all this is poised to change. Now that the Snowden files have sensitized us to the level of such activities, we have become acutely aware that many of our tools are just way too trusting, way too chatty, and way too easily subverted. First and foremost in this collection of vulnerable tools is the Domain Name System.
Open Season
In June 2016, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) hosted a meeting of ministers to consider the state of the Digital Economy.
The central message from this meeting was the message that: “Governments must act faster to help people and firms to make greater use of the Internet and remove regulatory barriers to digital innovation or else risk missing out on the potentially huge economic and social benefits of the digital economy.” All well and good, and as a piece of rhetoric, it seems to strike an appropriately positive note without straying far from what appears to be bland truisms of our time.
Fragmenting IPv6
The design of IPv6 represented a relatively conservative evolutionary step of the Internet protocol. Mostly, it's just IPv4 with significantly larger address fields. Mostly, but not completely, as there were some changes. IPv6 changed the boot process to use auto-configuration and multicast to perform functions that were performed by ARP and DHCP in IPv4. IPv6 added a 20-bit Flow Identifier to the packet header. IPv6 replaced IP header options with an optional chain of extension headers. IPv6 also changed the behaviour of packet fragmentation. Which is what we will look at here.
On the Internet, Everyone is Connected to Everyone Else. Right?
We tend to make a number of assumptions about the Internet, and sometimes these assumptions don’t always stand up to critical analysis. We were perhaps ‘trained’ by the claims of the telephone service to believe that these communications networks supported a model of universal connectivity. Any telephone handset could establish a call with any other telephone handset was the underlying model of a ubiquitous telephone service, and we’ve carried that assumption into our perception of the Internet. On the Internet anyone can communicate with anyone else – right?
Evaluating IPv4 and IPv6 Packet Fragmentation
One of the more difficult design exercises in packet-switched network architectures is that of the design of packet fragmentation. In this article, I’d like to examine IP packet fragmentation in detail and look at the design choices made by IP version 4, and then compare that with the design choices made by IP version 6.
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