Last week, thanks to the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) conference, Prague became the center of the Internet community. It was for the fourth time that the Czech Republic was given the honor to host this important meeting where RFC (Request for Comments) standards are created: Prague hosted it in March 2007 (68th IETF), 2011 (80th IETF) and July 2015 (93th IETF), with our Association having taken part in organizing the last three meetings.
How was the #TurrisHack17 ?
Since the beginning of the Turris project, we have been very happy for the opportunity to cooperate closely with our community. Without it, the project would not have been where it is now. It was largely the interest of potential users that pushed us to start a campaign on Indiegogo and, again, it was the community that enabled the campaign to become so successful. This success also helped to significantly broaden the community of users and expand it from the Czech Republic to the world.
What do Postel, IETF and today’s Internet have in common?
On July 16-21, 2017, the IETF 99 conference will take place in Prague. What IETF is and how it works has been already explained by my colleague Ondřej Surý in Czech Cesta do hlubin IETF, Odkud pochází internetové standardy (aneb bylo jednou jedno RFC) or Vrána k vráně sedá aneb koťátka, dogy a nápoje v IETF. Ladislav Lhotka, in turn, described its unusual geeky atmosphere IETF: internet podle mručící většiny. So it is enough to mention that IETF is an organization that publishes Internet standards. Its goal is to create quality technical documentation that influences the development of the Internet and its applications.
How could eIDAS help Czech companies in Slovakia?
In just a few days, all entrepreneurs in Slovakia will have active electronic mailboxes, which is the counterpart of our data boxes. Although the inspiration from the Czech system is obvious, there is at least one significant difference.
Let’s make DNS great again!
I hope former US President Ronald Reagan would forgive me for borrowing and altering the slogan of his presidential campaign. After all, quite a few people seem to be doing it these days.
From honeypots to router analysis
It all started when we received a response to one of the automatic e-mails generated by our honeypots when they detect an attack attempt or suspicious behavior. These notifications are sent to abuse contacts of the network from which the attack originated. Portscan of the WAN interface:
Impressions from the Locked Shields 2017
Locked Shields is the largest international cyber security drill. It is regularly organised since 2010 by NATO CCDOE (Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence), and the focus of the drill is a clash between two teams. The red team attacks the blue team, which plays the role of the defender. This year, the drill was attended by a total of 19 blue teams. The teams were charged with the defense of a diverse computer infrastructure of a fictional country’s military base consisting of different servers, numerous workstations, SCADA systems, etc. The defenders were to face attackers, whose objective was to damage, compromise, or completely take down the network or its elements, or at least to make things complicated for the defenders. In addition to the technical part, the drill is focused also on strategic decision-making, cooperation with the press and the handling legal matters. We were invited by colleagues from GovCert and assigned to the “Linux team”.
Are open validating resolvers still relevant today?
For many years, our association has been running a service going by the acronym “ODVR” – Open DNSSEC Validating Resolvers. At times when DNSSEC was just beginning, we thought it was necessary to come up with an alternative to DNS resolvers provided by ISPs who introduced the validation support too slowly. Since then, we have offered a publicly available service that allows validation of domains using DNSSEC security even in those networks whose default DNS resolvers do not support this.
New statistics and increase in popularity of elliptic curves in DNSSEC
It has been almost half a year since we presented the intention to change the DNSSEC algorithm for .cz zone DNSSEC key at our IT 16.2 conference. In his presentation, our colleague Zdeněk Brůna described in detail the advantages of algorithms based on elliptic curves, especially the ECDSA algorithm. However, due to the situation where this step cannot be done because of the lack of support for this algorithm in the root zone, our activities have shifted to mainly educate and monitor the impact of this education on the state of support for this new technology. At a seminar with registrars that we held at the end of February, we noticed a positive response to some ECDSA properties, such as smaller zone file size or smaller DNS response size. Some registrars have already declared interest in switching to ECDSA. At the same time, the registrars have suggested that we publish statistics on our site showing how different DNSSEC algorithms are used in the .cz zone. We liked this idea and we are now publishing these statistics.
How the TTL reducing impacted the .cz zone
In mid-February we informed about Reducing TTL in the .cz zone by one hour. Then, at a similar hour every Wednesday, we reduced it by another hour, until on March 15, 2017 we reached the required value of 1 hour (i.e. TTL=3600).