In this episode of PING, Dr Romain Fontugne, the deputy director of research at IIJ Labs in Tokyo discusses the IIJ "Internet Health Report" and AS Hegemony (or network centrality) in particular.

This is a data model they have been working on for some time (6 years now) which exposes dependencies between ASs in BGP, both directly (as in customer-cone) and indirectly through transitive dependencies. It's a fascinating insight into how BGP dependencies can be seen through the state of the routing table worldwide, and how IIJ are helping BGP speakers understand the dependencies in the transit paths they use. It's also a fertile space for student engagement with google summer of code opportunities.

You can read more about AS Hegemony on the APNIC blog, as well as other posts Romain has made reflecting IIJ's research.

• AS hegemony: measuring AS interdependence (2018)
• BGP zombies (2019)
• The impact of COVID-19 on last-mile latency (2020)

IIJ's Internet Health Report (IHR) is reachable at http://ihr.iijlab.net 

In this episode of PING, APNIC's Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communications and the amazing effects they are having on internet reach worldwide.

Read more about the issues in LEO and satellite communications on the APNIC Blog.

Here's some recent articles of note:

• Getting hands-on experience with Starlink (Ulrich Speidel)
• Everything, everywhere, all the time (for the internet at least) (George Michaelson)
• The APRICOT Panel discussing satellite broadband in the Asia Pacific region (Geoff Huston, Dan York, Debopam Batterchee, Ulrich Speidel, Mike Puchol)
• How does starlink compare to broadband (Mohamed Kassem in 2022)
• Fact checking Starlink’s performance figures (Martino Trevisan in 2022)

The views expressed by the featured speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC.

In this episode of PING, Dr Rolf Winter, the Professor of Data Communications at Augsburg University of Applied Sciences discusses his work on ‘reverse traceroute’, which is an approach to using the well-known traceroute mechanism but driven from the other end.

The inherent problem with traceroute and its related diagnostics is that it only informs you about the path outwards from your address to the other end.

Reverse traceroute is an attempt to ‘mechanize’ the reverse path information, using proposed new codepoints in the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP). Rolf discusses this approach and some of the logistical issues with attempting to modify an established protocol like ICMP, and measurements of the acceptability of proposed new codepoints in the wild.

Read more about Professor Winter’s work on the APNIC Blog:

• Troubleshooting ‘the other half’
• Watch his presentation at DENOG 14
• Visit his GitHub code repository

In this episode of PING, APNIC's Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses DNSSEC and presents a case "for" and "against" deployment, in the context of complexity, fragility, and impact on the DNS process at large. DNSSEC is net beneficial but its by no means automatic to deploy it protecting a zone.

Read more about the issues in DNSSEC deployment on the APNIC Blog:

• to DNSSEC or not? (Geoff Huston)
• IP Fragmentation and the DNS - Mitigation (Carsten Strotmann)
• DNSSEC Validation - Performance Killer (Petr Špaček)
• [Podcast] DNS spoofing is a non-issue if we all do DNSSEC (Geoff Huston)
• Addressing the challenges of modern DNS (Moritz Müller)

And for Geoff's continuing measurement of DNSSEC see https://stats.labs.apnic.net/dnssec for his daily updated measurements of DNSSEC validation.

The views expressed by the featured speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC.

In this episode of PING, Andre Geldeblom from APNIC product development discusses how APNIC is measuring user experience, satisfaction and engagement with the "Orbit" system we deployed to provide web services integrated with email.

Andre discusses the different motivations and mechanisms we're using at APNIC to understand "UX" and how this integrates in our planning to deliver "value for money" to the APNIC community.

Read about the different motivations and mechanisms we’re using at APNIC to understand “UX” and how this integrates in our planning to deliver “value for money” to the APNIC community.

• Upcoming changes to MyAPNIC (Andre, October 2022)
• how APNIC is implementing your feedback (Dale, September 2022)
• Improving Accessibility at APNIC (Dale, August 2021)
• APNIC help centre now live (Andre, February 2021)
• Help APNIC create better products and services (Dale, September 2020)

The views expressed by the featured speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC.

In this episode of PING, APNIC's Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the current situation in BGP across IPv4 and IPv6. Historically. we've met the "running out of memory" problem with incremental upgrades but things have now come to a place where "simply adding more memory" may not be the answer, and the dynamics of BGP growth appear to have changed.

Geoff explores the changing surface of the BGP default-free zone, and what it means for routing technology and the ISP

Read more about the APNIC Labs analysis of BGP on the APNIC Blog:

• BGP in 2022 - The Routing Table
• BGP in 2022 - BGP Updates
• IP Addressing through 2022

And for Geoff's continuing measurement of BGP see bgp.potaroo.net for his daily updated history of BGP from 1994.

The views expressed by the featured speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC.

In this episode of PING, Ege Cem Kirci from ETH Zurich discusses his IMC paper on users perceptions of internet outages, measured using Google Trends. This was presented at the IMC conference held in NIce, France in October 2022.

Ege and his co-authors have been exploring the relationship of Internet outages, (for example caused by weather events) and the information in google trends, with a mechanism to combine snapshots of data by time period which auto-scale, to a single unified time series. In their IMC talk they presented SIFT, a detection and analysis tool for capturing user-affecting Internet outages. SIFT leverages users' aggregated web search activity to detect outages.

Watch Ege's presentation :

• "Is my Internet down?": Sifting through User-Affecting Outages with Google Trends

The views expressed by the featured speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC.

In this episode of PING, APNIC's Chief Scientist Geoff Huston explores how APNIC Labs has been able to look inside behaviour in the DNS, to see signs of the "centrality" problem: How much concentration of delivery of service is there, across different market segments of users, and between the supply side (name serving as an authority) and and request side (recursive resolvers)

Read more about the APNIC Labs measurement of DNS:

• Looking at Centrality in the DNS

The views expressed by the featured speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC.

In this episode of PING, Luuk Hendricks and Willem Toorop from NLNet talk about their work to embed telemetry in the linux kernel using eXpress Data Path (XDP)

Read more about XDP in a series of articles published in the APNIC blog:

• Journeying into XDP: Part 0
• Journeying into XDP: Augmenting the DNS
• Journeying into XDP: Fully-fledged DNS service augmentation
• Journeying into XDP: Augmenting the DNS

and their blog covering this episode of Ping:

• Journeying into XDP: XDPerimenting with DNS telemetry

The views expressed by the featured speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC.

In this episode of PING, APNIC's Chief Scientist Geoff Huston talks through some of the presentations he saw (and gave) at the recent DNS OARC 39 meeting held in Belgrade.

Read more about DNS OARC and the presentations mentioned:

• DNS OARC
• Casey Deccio's presentation on DITL data and vulnerabilities
• Geoff Huston's presentation on resolverless DNS
• David Lawrence's presentation on the registrar API problem

All of the DNS OARC 39 Speakers and their presentations can also be seen online now.

The views expressed by the featured speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC.