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Posted: Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
IETF JournalTable of Contents - Volume 3 Issue 3 (December 2007)
Full edition in PDF formatThe full edition is available here for download in PDF format (1.15MB). Posted: Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
From the Editor’s DeskBy Mirjam Kühne Even though IPv6 and related topics were, once again, being discussed at the most recent meet-ing of the IETF, another, higher-level discussion took place at IETF 70 in Vancouver, Canada, last December: How can one measure the success of a standard and protocol developed within the IETF? Dave Thaler and Bernard Aboba have studied that issue, and they offered a number of answers, some of which are surprising. Read their presentation. 
Vancouver, site of IETF 70
Photo Credit: Mirjam Kühne, with permission The subject stimulated good discussions at IETF 70 and raises some interesting issues, particularly as it relates to Internet security and security protocols. While opinions may vary about whether security protocols developed by the IETF are successful, security remains a topic close to IETF’s heart. For more than 10 years, every document has been required to include a section on security considerations. Still, the enormous amounts of unwanted traffic on the Internet cause concern. A few years ago, the Internet Architecture Board held a workshop on the subject. In this issue of the IETF Journal, we feature an updated summary of the workshop, including a number of important facts and notable observations. Also in this issue you’ll read about João Damas’s and Frederico Neves’s solution to a long-standing security hole in the Domain Name System, which is described in their article The Perfect Attack. Typically, the IETF Journal features short updates of the ongoing activities of Internet Research Task Force research groups. In this issue, we are pleased to offer more-detailed reports of those activities, including current work, achievements, and future plans. We would also like to call attention to a number of newcomers who have contributed to this issue of the IETF Journal. One is Tomas Carlsson, who, in addition to an in-depth report on the IETF 70 fellows, offers an analysis of IETF culture. Another is Bryan Ford, an MIT student who reports on new directions in the Transport Area. We thank all of our contributors to this issue, and we wish you fun reading. And, as always, we welcome both your comments and your contributions for future issues. Posted: Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
Message from the IETF ChairBy Russ Housley 
Russ Housley, IETF Chair
The IETF returned to Vancouver, Canada, in December 2007 for IETF 70. The Westin Bayshore, site of our previous visit to Vancouver, has excellent facilities for the IETF. With 1,114 people attending from 37 countries, the meeting was, by all accounts, successful, with progress made in many working groups (WGs). Cisco Research and Microsoft served as hosts for the event, and the site network was subcontracted to VeriLAN Networks. Sponsors included BC.NET, Eyeball, Huawei, and Telus. On behalf of the IETF, I’d like to express my gratitude and appreciation to our hosts and sponsors for their outstanding contributions. As usual, the IETF depends on a team of dedicated volunteers, which this time included a group of programmers who helped with the development of software tools that are used by the IETF on the Saturday before the meeting. The week was filled with the usual mixture of working group meetings, BoF (birds-of-a-feather) sessions, research group meetings, and, as always, many side meetings. (more…) Posted: Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
Words from the IAB ChairBy Olaf Kolkman 
Olaf Kolkman, IAB Chair
The technical plenary during IETF 69 in Chicago did not include a technical presentation. During the open-microphone session at that IETF, a number of people in the audience expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of a substantive technical presentation. In contrast, IETF 70 in Vancouver featured two technical topics that were sufficiently thought provoking to stimulate lively debate. The technical plenary serves as a forum in which the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) reports and receives feedback from the community. The IAB chair’s report, the IRTF (Internet Research Task Force) chair’s report, and the open- microphone session are fixed agenda items. These agenda items serve a purpose similar to those of the IAOC (Internet Administrative Oversight Committee) and the IESG (Internet Engineering Steering Group) administrative plenary sessions: they serve as a meaningful and effective way for the IAB to receive feedback from and undergo scrutiny by the community. (more…) Posted: Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
IETF 70 Facts and FiguresRegistered attendees: 1,114 RFC Editor Actions(March-June 2007)
IANA Actions (Jul-Oct 2007)Processed ~1,600 IETF-related requests of which:
Posted: Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
Plenary ReportBy Mirjam Kühne 
Mirjam Kühne
Following a warm welcome by IETF chair Russ Housley, Stephen Wolff of the Cisco Research Center, one of the hosts of IETF 70 together with Microsoft, gave a presentation in which he reflected on Internet research. Stephen’s participation in the IETF goes back to its beginnings. Stephen recalled that at the second meeting of the IETF in April 1986-which was considerably smaller than today’s meetings and which had a much smaller network-a presentation by Bob Hinden showed the actual size of the Internet: “131 Networks, 85+ Gateways, 160,000,000 packets/week.” At the time, there was not a lot of Internet-related research and there weren’t many textbooks on networking. In fact, the entire library of Internet-related books would most likely have fit on one shelf. (more…) Posted: Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
An Interview with ISOC Fellow Subramanian MoonesamyBy Tomas Carlsson 
Tomas Carlsson
“Now I got to put a face to all strong people from the mailing lists,” said Subramanian Moonesamy, the man from exotic Mauritius. While the rest of the world dreams of visiting this mythic island country, SM, as he is called, had one of his dreams fulfilled when he attended IETF 70 in Vancouver as part of the ISOC Fellowship to the IETF programme. Think of Earth as a ball of wool. Then think about pushing a knitting needle in where Vancouver would be. At the other side of the ball is where Mauritius is located, a 2,000-square-kilometre island east of Madagascar. The knitting needle is a good metaphor, representing the ideal connection to the U.S. IP backbone. For more than five years, SM has been active in several IETF mailing lists. And while he has made comments on and suggestions for drafts, he never thought he would ever attend a meeting. “It seemed very far away,” SM said. (more…) Posted: Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
Fellows Motivated to Become more InvolvedBy Tomas Carlsson 
IETF fellows and mentors in Vancouver
Photo Credit: Thomas Carlsson, with permission Becoming more active in IETF working groups is the goal of all five participants in the ISOC Fellowship to the IETF programme after their visit to Vancouver for IETF 70. “I will spread more information about the IETF to colleagues at home,” said Fellow Pedro Torres. The IETF Journal chatted with each of the fellows, focusing on their perceptions of the meeting and on the status of the Internet in their countries. Pedro manages an Internet-based academic backbone as well as an Internet exchange point and a metropolitan area network. His home city of Curitiba, Brazil, is in the Parana region, which is smaller in poulation than all of São Paulo. Pedro is concerned about the relatively few IETF-meeting participants from Africa and South America. “We use the standards but do not participate in creating the solutions,” he said. (more…) Posted: Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
Unwanted TrafficBy Elwyn Davies The Internet carries a lot of unwanted traffic today. At its most fundamental, unwanted traffic is made up of packets that consume network and computing resources in ways that do not benefit the owners of the resources. To gain a better understanding of the driving forces behind such unwanted traffic and to assess existing countermeasures, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) organised a workshop in March 2006 called Unwanted Internet Traffic. At the workshop, a number of experts - including operators, vendors, and researchers-exchanged experiences, views, and ideas on this important topic (the full report of the workshop was published in RFC 4948). This article presents the findings of the workshop and looks at some developments that have occurred since the workshop. (more…) Posted: Friday, February 22nd, 2008
Recent IESG Document and Protocol ActionsListing of recent IESG Document and Protocol Actions (more…) Posted: Friday, February 22nd, 2008
The Unique Political Soul of the IETFBy Tomas Carlsson Known to the world are two different political systems. Known to the IETF community is a third system. Whether we call it IETF democracy or Majhum (majority by humming), IETF meeting attendees will know what I mean. Everyone else will have to fight through several levels of abstractions to get a sense of it. (more…) Posted: Monday, February 25th, 2008
IETF Loses Participant and Former IAB MemberThe Internet Society and the IETF community mourn the loss of Jun-ichiro “Itojunâ€? Hagino, who died on 29 October 2007. He was 37 years old. (more…) Posted: Monday, February 25th, 2008
What Makes For a Successful Protocol?By Dave Thaler and Bernard Aboba HTTP/HTML versus Gopher. IPv4 versus IPX. Interdomain IP Multicast versus application-layer overlays. As we learned from the more mainstream VHS-versus-Betamax-format war, the reasons that one technology or protocol takes off while another one crashes and burns are obvious only in retrospect. (more…) Posted: Monday, February 25th, 2008
Security Protocol FailuresBy Phillip Hallam-Baker This article is a condensed version of the argument made in The dotCrime Manifesto: How to Stop Internet Crime, in which the question of how to fix these problems is considered.
The Internet is insecure, so what went wrong? Contrary to widely held belief, the reasons for Internet security protocol failure are not primarily technical. Failure to understand the risk model and to meet the actual user requirements are much more significant causes of security failure. The economics of security protocol deployment and security usability engineering are also key: a protocol might as well not exist if it is not used. (more…) Posted: Monday, February 25th, 2008
Doing Business Securely in an Insecure WorldBy Randy Bush What real improvements in Internet security have we achieved? The Net certainly is not a safe place as long as there are phishing, DDoS attacks, and cross-site script HTML attacks. However, although those are serious problems, we should not ignore the ways in which we have been successful in making the Net a safer place, and we should try to take some lessons from those successes. (more…) Posted: Monday, February 25th, 2008
Directions in Internet Transport EvolutionBy Bryan Ford At the Transport Area Open Meeting at IETF 70, area directors Magnus Westerlund and Lars Eggert noted that their queues are empty and that several Transport Area working groups are nearing completion. It may therefore be an opportune time to step back and consider possible directions for new projects in the Transport Area. (more…) Posted: Monday, February 25th, 2008
The Perfect AttackBy João Damas and Frederico Neves Attacks of all types have existed on the Internet for a long time. They have targeted individual users, servers, client machines or applications, and the infrastructure itself. They have had different degrees of success in achieving their goals, many of which have not always been clear for everyone to see. (more…) Posted: Monday, February 25th, 2008
IRTF ReportBy Aaron Falk What follows are summaries of several updates on the Internet Research Groups (RGs), some of which were reported during the Technical Plenary at IETF 70. (more…) Posted: Monday, February 25th, 2008
IETF Meeting CalendarIETF 719–14 March 2008 IETF 7227 July–1 August 2008 IETF 7316–21 November 2008 IETF 7422–27 March 2009 Posted: Monday, February 25th, 2008
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