Episodes

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses a problem which cropped up recently with the location tagging of IP addresses seen in the APNIC Labs measurement system. For compiling national/economic and regional statistics, and to understand the experimental distribution into each market segment, Labs relies on the freely available geolocation databases from maxmind.com, and IPinfo.io -which in turn are constructed from a variety of sources such as BGP data, the RIR compi...

RSSAC047 - a document from the Root Server System Advisory Committee proposed a set of metrics to measure DNS root servers, and the DNS root server system as a whole. the document was approved in 2020, and ICANN worked on an implementation of the metrics as code, and a deployment into 20 points of measurement distributed worldwide. ISC and Verisign, two of the root server operators proposed a review of this measurement and retained SIDN Labs (who are part of the Dutch body operating .NL as a Cou...

In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston shares a story from the recent AusNOG in Melbourne and connects it to measurement work at APNIC Labs, exploring how modern IP flow control manages ‘fair shares’ of the network. At AusNOG 2025, Geoff attended a talk by Lincoln Dale of Amazon AWS titled “No Packet Left Behind: AWS’s Approach to Building and Operating Reliable Networks”. The presentation examined how AWS scales its data centre networks, highlighting massive investments in ...

In this episode of PING, Adli Wahid, APNIC's Security Specialist discusses the APNIC honeypot network, an investment in over 400 collectors distributed throughout the Asia Pacific, collecting data on who is trying to break into systems online and use them for malware, destributed denial of service, and command-and-control systems in the bad traffic economy. Adli discusses how APNIC Members can get access to the results of honeynet traffic capture coming from their network address ranges, and ori...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, discusses the economic inevitability of centrality, in the modern Internet. Despite our best intentions, and a lot of long standing belief amongst the IETF technologists, no amount of open standards and end-to-end protocol design prevents large players at all levels of the network (from the physical infrastructure right up to the applications and the data centres which house them) from seeking to acquire smaller competitors, and avo...

In this episode of PING, Robert Kisteleki from the RIPE NCC discusses the RIPE Atlas system -a network of over 13,000 measurement devices deployed worldwide in homes, exchange points, stub and transit AS, densely connected regions and sparse island states. Atlas began with a vision of the world at night -a powerful metaphor for where people are, and where technology reaches. Could a measurement system achieve sufficient density to "light up the internet" in a similar manner? Could network measur...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, discusses "a day in the life of BGP" -Not an extraordinary day, not a special day, just the 8th of May. What happens inside the BGP system, from the point of view of AS4608, one ordinary BGP speaker on the edge of the network? What kinds of things are seen, and why are they seen? Geoff has been measuring BGP for almost it's entire life as the internet routing protocol, but this time looks at the dynamics at a more "micro" level than...

In this episode of PING, Doug Madory from Kentik discusses his rundown of the state of play in secure BGP across 2024 and 2025. Kentik has it’s own internal measurements of BGP behaviour and flow data across the surface of the internet, which combined with the Oregon University curated routeviews archive means Doug can analyse both the publicly visible state of BGP from archives, and Kentik’s own view of the dynamics of BGP change, along side other systems like the worldwide RPKI model, and the ...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, discusses the root zone of the DNS, and some emerging concerns in how much it costs to service query load at the root. In the absence of cacheing, all queries in the DNS (except ones the DNS system you ask is locally authoritative for anyway) have to be sent through the root of the DNS, to find the right nameserver to ask for the specific information. Thanks to cacheing, this system doesn't drown in the load of every worldwide query...

In this episode of PING, We’re talking to Leslie Daigle from the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) again, discussing GCA’s honeynet project. Leslie spoke with PING back in January 2024, and in this episode we re-visit things. Honeynets (or Honey farms) are deliberately weakly protected systems put online, to see what kinds of bad traffic exist out in the global Internet, where they come from and what kinds of attack they are mounting. In the intervening period GCA has continued to develop its honeyfar...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, revisits changes underway in how the Domain Name System (DNS) delegates authority over a given zone and how resolvers discover the new authoritative sources. We last explored this in March 2024.  In DNS, the word ‘domain’ refers to a scope of authority. Within a domain, everything is governed by its delegated authority. While that authority may only directly manage its immediate subdomains (children), its control implicitly extends...

In this episode of PING, Professor Cristel Pelsser who holds the chair of critical embedded systems at UCLouvain Discusses her work measuring BGP and in particular the system described in the 2024 SIGCOMM “best paper” award winning research: “The Next Generation of BGP Data Collection Platforms” Cristel and her collaborators Thomas Alfroy, Thomas Holterbach, Thomas Krenc and K. C. Claffy have built a system they call GILL, available on the web at https://bgproutes.io This work also features a ne...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, discusses the history and emerging future of how Internet protocols get more than the apparent link bandwidth by using multiple links and multiple paths. Initially, the model was quite simple, capable of handling up to four links of equal cost and delay reasonably well, typically to connect two points together. At the time, the Internet was built on telecommunications services originally designed for voice networks, with cabling lai...

Last month, during APRICOT 2025 / APNIC 59, the Internet Society hosted its first Pulse Internet Measurement Forum (PIMF). PIMF brings together people interested in Internet measurement from a wide range of perspectives — from technical details to policy, governance, and social issues. The goal is to create a space for open discussion, uniting both technologists and policy experts. In this second special episode of PING, we continue our break from the usual one-on-one podcast format and present ...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, discusses the surprisingly vexed question of how to say ‘no’ in the DNS. This conversation follows a presentation by Shumon Huque at the recent DNS OARC meeting, who will be on PING in a future episode talking about another aspect of the DNS protocol. You would hope this is a simple, straightforward answer to a question, but as usual with the DNS, there are more complexities under the surface. The DNS must indicate whether the label...

At the APRICOT/APNIC59 meeting held in Petaling Jaya in Malaysia last month, The internet society held it's first PIMF meeting. PIMF, or the Pulse Internet Measurement Forum is a gathering of people interested in Internet measurement in the widest possible sense, from technical information all the way to policy, governance and social questions. ISOC is interested in creating a space for the discussion to take place amongst the community, and bring both technologists and policy specialists into t...

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston explores bgp "Zombies" which are routes which should have been removed, but are still there. They're the living dead of routes. How does this happen? Back in the early 2000s Gert Döring in the RIPE NCC region was collating a state of BGP for IPv6 report, and knew each of the 300 or so IPv6 announcements directly. He understood what should be seen, and what was not being routed. He discovered in this early stage of IPv6 that some rout...

In this episode, Job Snijders discusses RPKIViews, his long term project to collect the "views" of RPKI state every day, and maintain an archive of BGP route validation states. The project is named to reflect route views, the long-standing archive of BGP state maintained by the University of Oregon, which has been discussed on PING. Job is based in the Netherlands, and has worked in BGP routing for large international ISPs and content distribution networks as well as being a board member of the ...

In his first episode of PING for 2025, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston returns to the Domain Name System (DNS) and explores the many faces of name servers behind domains. Up at the root, (the very top of the namespace, where all top-level domains like .gov or .au or .com are defined to exist) there is a well established principle of 13 root nameservers. Does this mean only 13 hosts worldwide service this space? Nothing could be farther from the truth! literally thousands of hosts act as on...

Welcome back to PING, at the start of 2025. In this episode, Gautam Akiwate, (now with Apple, but at the time of recording with Stanford University) talks about the 2021 Advanced Network Research Prize winning paper, co-authored with Stefan Savage, Geoffrey Voelker and Kimberly Claffy which was titled "Risky BIZness: Risks Derived from Registrar Name Management". The paper explores a situation which emerged inside the supply chain behind DNS name delegation, in the use of an IETF protocol called...

In the last episode of PING for 2024, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the shift from existing public-private key cryptography using the RSA and ECC algorithms to the world of ‘Post Quantum Cryptography. These new algorithms are designed to withstand potential attacks from large-scale quantum computers and are capable of implementing Shor’s algorithm, a theoretical approach for using quantum computing to break the cryptographic keys of RSA and ECC. Standards agencies like NIST are ...

This time on PING, Peter Thomassen from SSE and DEsec.io discusses his analysis of the failure modes of CDS and CDNSKEY records between parent and child in the DNS. These records are used to provide in-band signalling of the DS record, fundamental to the maintenance of a secure path from the trust anchor to the delegation through all the intermediate parent and grandparent domains. Many people use out-of-band methods to update this DS information, but the CDS and the CDNSKEY records are designed...

In his regular monthly spot on PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the slowdown in worldwide IPv6 uptake. Although within the Asia-Pacific footprint we have some truly remarkable national statistics, such as India which is now over 80% IPv6 enabled by APNIC Labs measurements, And Vietnam which is not far behind on 70% the problem is that worldwide, adjusted for population and considering levels of internet penetration in the developed economies, the pace of uptake overall has no...

In this episode of PING, Vanessa Fernandez and Kavya Bhat, two students from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK) discuss the student led, multi-year project to deploy IPv6 at their campus. Kavya & Vanessa have just graduated, and are moving into their next stages of work and study in computer sciences and network engineering. Across 2023 and 2024 they were able to attend IETF118 and IETF119 and present on their project and it’s experiences to the IPv6 working groups and off-Wor...