IETF Journal
Table of Contents - Volume 7, Issue 1 (July 2011)
Making the Internet Work Better: Bufferbloat and Secure Routing Infrastructure at IETF 80
From the Editor’s Desk, by Matthew Ford
The IETF has been working on securing the routing infrastructure of the Internet for many years. The Secure Inter-Domain Routing (sidr) working group has recently been rechartered and it is, therefore, timely to review the status of the current efforts in the IETF on this topic. Contributing authors Geoff Huston and Randy Bush do just that in our cover article, Securing BGP and SIDR.
 Prague, Czech Republic, site of IETF 80 A new feature in this issue of the IETF Journal is our IETF Ornithology column, which provides an overview of the proceedings and outcomes of the Birds-of-a Feather (BoF) meetings that took place during IETF 80. These are frequently some of the most interesting and accessible meetings for a general observer as participants seek to explain the background to and motivations for new work topics.
Jim Gettys has been on the campaign trail since late last year trying to raise awareness of the issues caused by excessively large buffers in network hardware and software. His presentation to the Transport Area Open Meeting during IETF 80 generated a lot of discussion, and we present an article from him on the topic in this issue. You can follow progress on this topic at http://www.bufferbloat.net/.
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This article was posted on 2 August 2011
Securing BGP and SIDR
By Geoff Huston and Randy Bush
For many years the Internet’s fundamental elements—names and addresses—were the source of basic structural vulnerabilities in the network. With the increasing momentum behind the deployment of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) there is some cause for optimism that we have the elements of securing the name space now in hand, but what about addresses and routing? In this article we look at current efforts within the IETF to secure the use of addresses within the routing infrastructure of the Internet, and the current work of the Secure Inter-Domain Routing (SIDR) working group.
We will look at the approach taken by the SIDR Working Group and examine the architecture and mechanisms that have been adopted as part of this study. This work was undertaken in three stages: the first concentrated on the mechanisms to support attestations relating to addresses and their use; the second looked at how to secure origination of routing announcements; and the third looked at how to secure the transitive part of BGP route propagation.
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This article was posted on 2 August 2011
Message from the IETF Chair
By Russ Housley
The work of the IETF remains relevant and energetic!
 Russ Housley, IETF Chair IETF 80 was the second IETF meeting held in Prague, Czech Republic (the first was IETF 68 in March 2007) and, once again, CZ.NIC did a wonderful job as host. It was a very successful meeting, attended by 1,196 people from 49 different countries. The facilities at the Hilton were comfortable and the unique social event on Tuesday evening at the Municipal House was well attended. On behalf of the IETF community, I would like to express our appreciation to Comcast and Trilogy for their generous sponsorship as well as to Dial Telecom, which provided network connectivity. Thank you to all for your support.
Many working groups (WGs) made significant progress at IETF 80. It was a genuine pleasure to see so many talented people engaged and collaborating.
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This article was posted on 2 August 2011
Words from the IAB Chair
By Bernard Aboba
 Bernard Aboba, IAB Chair At the March 2011 IETF meeting, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) selected new leadership for both the IAB and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). Lars Eggert was named chair of the IRTF, succeeding Aaron Falk. I was named IAB chair, succeeding Olaf Kolkman. The IAB would like to express its gratitude to both Aaron and Olaf for their years of dedicated service to the community.
The IETF 80 Technical Plenary focused on the evolution of browser functionality and some of the implications for the future of applications. Jon Peterson organized the session, which included presentations by IAB alumni Harald Alvestrand, Leslie Daigle, and Jonathan Rosenberg as well as Henry Thompson from the W3C TAG.
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This article was posted on 2 August 2011
ISOC Panel Debates Metrics for IPv6 Progress
By Carolyn Duffy Marsan
What metrics should the Internet engineering community use to track deployment of IPv6? That was the question debated by a panel of experts at an Internet Society event held on 29 March in conjunction with the IETF meeting in Prague, Czech Republic.
The panel, entitled “IPv6: How will we know we’ve arrived?”, considered various measurements of IPv6 deployment, including traffic statistics, hardware capability, support from existing Web services, and the creation of new applications.
Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer at the Internet Society, said a statistic such as having 20 percent of the Internet’s traffic using IPv6 by the end of 2011 is beyond a stretch goal. That’s because CZ.NIC, Arbor Networks, and others estimate that IPv6 currently represents around 0.1 percent or 0.2 percent of all Internet traffic.
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This article was posted on 2 August 2011
Technical Plenary Tackles Role of IETF in Application Protocols
By Carolyn Duffy Marsan
What role—if any–should the IETF play in the development of application protocols? That was the hot-button issue debated by expert panelists at the Internet Architecture Board’s technical plenary session on March 28 in Prague, Czech Republic.
The panellists noted that today’s Internet application developers tend to favour an open source approach, such as publishing their own application programming interfaces (APIs), rather than participating in standards bodies such as the IETF. The reason developers are doing this is because it dramatically shortens their time to market versus going through the traditional standards development process.
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This article was posted on 2 August 2011
Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers in the Internet
By Jim Gettys
© 2011 IEEE. Reprinted with permission from Jim Gettys, Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers in the Internet, IEEE Computing, May/June 2011.
We have conflated “speed” with “bandwidth.” As Stuart Cheshire wrote in “It’s the Latency, Stupid” (http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html), “Making more bandwidth is easy. Once you have bad latency, you’re stuck with it.” Bufferbloat is the existence of excessively large (bloated) buffers in systems, particularly network communication systems.
Bufferbloat is now (almost?) everywhere.
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This article was posted on 2 August 2011
Internet Society Fellows Bring First-Hand Experience of Standards Processes to Developing Countries
Four information technology professionals from Asia, Europe, and South America attended their first IETF meeting in March 2011 as part of the Internet Society’s Fellowship to the IETF Programme. The programme, which operates under the aegis of the Internet Society’s Next Generation Leaders Programme, enables Internet technologists from developing regions to participate more fully in the IETF’s standards work by facilitating their attendance at an IETF meeting.
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This article was posted on 2 August 2011
IETF Ornithology: Recent Sightings
Compiled by Mat Ford, with inputs from Harald Alvestrand, Francois Le Faucheur, Alexey Melnikov, Brian Rosen and Tim Chown.
Getting new work started in the IETF usually requires a birds-of-a-feather (BoF) meeting to discuss goals for the work and to help assess the level of interest in and support for new work. In this new regular feature of the IETF Journal, we will review the BoFs that took place during the most recent IETF meetings and summarize their intentions and outcomes.
BoF meetings have a very different tone than do [working group] WG meetings. The purpose of a BoF is to make sure that a good charter with good milestones can be created and that there are enough people willing to do the work needed in order to create standards. Some BoFs have Internet-Drafts already in process, whereas others start from scratch.
An advantage of having a draft before the BoF is to help focus the discussion. On the other hand, having a draft might tend to limit what the other folks in the BoF want to do in the charter. It’s important to remember that most BoFs are held in order to get support for an eventual working group, not to get support for a particular document.
Many BoFs don’t turn into WGs for a variety of reasons.
The Tao of IETF (http://www.ietf.org/tao.html)
If you are inspired to arrange a BoF meeting, please be sure to read RFC 5434: Considerations for Having a Successful Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) Session.
Full descriptions of the BoFs that took place during IETF 80 in Prague, the Czech Republic, can be found on the wiki at http://trac.tools.ietf.org/bof/trac/wiki/WikiStart.
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This article was posted on 2 August 2011
IETF 80 At–A–Glance
 The Internet Society's Leslie Daigle moderates the Internet Society panel discussion at IETF 80
- Registered attendees: 1196
- Newcomers: 173
- Number of countries: 49
- New WGs: 11
- WGs closed: 14
- WG currently chartered: 121
- New Internet-Drafts: 608
- 191 updated
- 54 updated more than once
- Updated Internet-Drafts: 1237
- IETF Last Calls: 151
- Internet-Drafts approved for publication: 164
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This article was posted on 2 August 2011
IRTF Update
By Lars Eggert
On behalf of the Internet Reseach Task Force (IRTF), I am pleased to report that of the 24 nominations received for the first award of the Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP), two submissions were awarded the Applied Networking Research Prize. Each submission was reviewed by two to four members of the selection committee, according to a diverse set of criteria, including scientific excellence and substance, timeliness, relevance, and potential impact on the Internet.
The awardees are Mattia Rossi for his research into reducing BGP traffic[1] and Beichuan Zhang[2] for his research into “green” traffic engineering.
Both researchers have been invited to present their findings at the IRTF Open Meeting, to be held during IETF 81, 24–29 July 2011, in Quebec City, Canada.
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This article was posted on 2 August 2011
IETF Meeting Calendar
IETF 81
- 24-29 July 2011
- Host: Research in Motion (RIM)
- Location: Quebec City, CA
IETF 82
- 13-18 November 2011
- Host: Taiwan Network Information Center (TWNIC)
- Location: Taipei, TW
IETF 83
- 25–30 March 2012
- Host: TBD
- Location: Paris, FR
IETF 84
- 29 July–3 August 2012
- Host: Google
- Location: Vancouver, BC, CA
This article was posted on 2 August 2011
Full edition in PDF
The full edition is available here for download in PDF.
This article was posted on 2 August 2011
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