IPAM

It's been a year since .com was signed, which was a major step forward towards Internet community support for DNSSEC implementation given that nearly 45% of all Internet domains fall within the .com branch. I was curious how other top level domains (TLDs) were doing in this regard so I checked out the ICANN Research site for TLD signing statistics. As shown in the following summary table, 22.5% of TLDs were signed a year ago, while 29.1% are signed as of today. This 31% jump in signed TLDs represents good progress, but there's still a way to go to get to DNSSEC ubiquity in chains of trust to the root zone. March 2011 March 2012 TLDs in the root zone 306 313 TLDs signed 69 91 % TLDs signed 22.5% 29.1% Another boost to DNSSEC deployment was announced last week in the form of a pending FCC recommendation that promotes the deployment of DNSSEC planned by several major ISPs. These ISPs will be implementing DNSSEC validation on their recursive servers, which their customers ...

I am in the process of compiling questions for the 2012 rendition of BT Diamond IP's IPv6 survey. This survey is open to anyone wishing to express their opinion about the state of IPv6 and deployment plans. While I'd like to retain some of the questions from last year's survey to identify shifts or trends in opinion, there's always room for one or two additional questions. So if there's a question that's on your mind, feel free to post a comment to this blog post and I'll consider it! I'm interested in what people are thinking about what conditions would hasten their plans to deploy IPv6, so I'm planning to add a question about this from the perspective of the IPv6 user density on the Internet. What would it take for you to consider this critical mass? 1 % of Internet users being IPv6, or 10%, or even 50%? Let me know if you agree this is a good question or if you have a different metric or any additional question ideas!

In response to a recent question asking what happened to IPv5, I offer the following response. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) maintains a centralized repository of Internet Protocol parameters. This function is critical to assure uniqueness of parameter settings to keep the Internet Protocol operating smoothly and without ambiguity. Among the parameters maintained by IANA are the assigned values of the version field of the IP header. As you might guess, for IPv4, the version value is 4, and for IPv6, the value is 6. But as new protocols are developed within the Internet community, parameter value assignments are requested of and assigned by IANA. In the case of the IP version parameter, the value of 5 has been assigned to the Internet Stream Protocol an experimental real-time streaming protocol. In fact, the IP version parameter has not only been assigned values 4, 5 and 6, it has also been assigned values of 7, 8 and 9 as shown in the following table from IANA ...

I was fiddling with a London Underground ticket machine to purchase a "tube" (subway) ticket upon my arrival here today, and a couple on the next machine over starting asking me questions...in French. Through gestures and pointing to the ticket machine screen display, I figured out that while the screen stated the Oyster card they wished to purchase covered the tram and bus, it did not mention use on the tube. I was experiencing some screen information shortcomings myself in desiring to purchase a zones 1-3 ticket, but only 1-1, 1-2 and 1-4 were offered. So given my prior research on the Oyster card and the incompleteness of our respective ticket machine user interfaces, I assured them that they Oyster card would work for the tube as well. But this experience struck me later in the day in that we were only able to successfully communicate when we supplemented our verbal attempts at communication with gestures and visual clues. Had they rang me on my phone and asked me the s...

Dark Reading reported this morning that the ufc.com, coach.com and coachfactory.com domains were hijacked using DNS attacks earlier this week. The attack was performed by hacking the DNS servers authoritative for these zones and re-pointing web addresses to the attacker's site. Anyone attempting to access UFC's or Coach's websites was unwittingly directed to the imposter's site. Apparently these domains were targeted due to their organizations' support of SOPA/PIPA anti-piracy bills. The attack was detected by a sudden large influx of web traffic at the attacker's hosting provider. Administrators monitoring the attacked domains' web resources would have noticed a corresponding drop in traffic, which is one way to detect such an attack. Had these zones been signed via DNSSEC, perhaps this attack impact would have been minimized. This would have been the case if a) the attacker was unable to "re-sign" each zone after modifying it, which would have ...

Global Times, a leading English news periodical in China, reported last week that the number of Internet uses in China surpassed half a billion by the end of last (calendar) year, according to the China Network Information Center. According to the report, China now counts 513 million Internet users, up from about 457 million at the end of 2010, about 12% growth. The question I've been trying to answer is how many of these 513 million users have IPv6 addresses vs. IPv4 addresses? As yet I have been unsuccessful in answering my own question. But I've found that Mike Leber from Hurricane Electric publishes a daily Global IPv6 Deployment Progress Report . This report lists the TLDs with IPv6 (surprisingly only 85.9% have IPv6 addressable name servers today), a summary of A and AAAA records for "next level domains" for each TLD, a summary of advertised autonomous systems (ASes) for IPv6 networks, top websites available over IPv6 and more. The top websites statistic is ...

What better time to unveil the IPv6 Resource Center at BT Diamond IP than immediately following the announcement about the World IPv6 Launch! We've amassed a variety of material on IPv6 that hopefully enables people to learn about IPv6, in whatever media they prefer - video, audio, webcast, or reading with white papers and books. World IPv6 Launch is not a deadline to implement IPv6. It's another means of publicizing the need to consider IPv6 deployment - is it right for you and when? IPv4 space is pretty much gone in Asia so as new IP address consumers in that part of the world comprising over 60% of the world's population begin using broadband and wireless devices, IPv6 address use on the Internet will grow. The homogeneous IPv4 Internet of today will evolve to a mixed IPv4-IPv6 Internet. How rapidly and to what proportion IPv6 will permeate this mix is unclear. But it makes sense to track this over time and to be ready should the IPv6 density reach a level where subs...