Internet Week 2015 (IW2015) is one of the major annual conferences in Japan. This year it was held in Akihabara (Gadget City) Tokyo, from 17 to 20 November 2015.
What is Internet Week in Tokyo?
Internet Week started as an IP meeting in 1990 with just 40 participants. Since then it has been held every year. The conference changed its name to Internet Week in 1997 and in 2015 attracted more than 2,600 participants.
Internet Week conferences target people who are engaged with research and development, network development and management, and service activities of the Internet, to share and learn the most up to date information and trends on Internet infrastructure technologies. People can meet and expand their human network at this conference as well.
IW conferences are organized by JPNIC and supported by many Internet-related organizations. APNIC also provided sponsorship for IW2014 and IW2015 to support this meaningful community event.
About IW2015
The theme of IW2015 was “Hand-in-Hand over the Hurdle”. Hiroshi Takada, chair of IW2015, offered the following reason about the theme:
In order to build and manage a better Internet environment, people need to collaborate to overcome security incidents by sharing the most up to date knowledge and information. People need to take each other’s hands to go beyond technical and operational challenges. Particularly IW conferences attract diversified people – industry, profession, generation etc. Therefore we can have in-depth meaningful discussions that enhance our learning.
IW2015 was chaired by Mr Takada (JPNIC Board Member) and co-chaired by Tomohiro Fujisaki (NTT), Hiroyuki Hourin (Japan UNIX Society) and Masato Yamaga (CSIRT Researcher). There were 25 Program Committee (PC) members, led by the PC Chair, Akinori Maemura, who all worked more than six months to develop meaningful program content.
IW2015 Program highlights
More than 40 sessions focusing on hot topics were prepared for IW2015. Specialists from industry and research fields contributed high quality content.
Picking only a few sessions for this article does not do justice to the entire program, but here is a summary of the more popular sessions:
Leanings from failures in building WiFi
Managing WiFi networks presents different challenges from managing wired networks. Some knowledge on the nature and characteristics of electric waves assists to understand the cause of problems of WiFi networks. Monitoring WiFi networks has to be done both on “normal” and “abnormal” situations. Several types of tools and measurement equipment are useful.
This session provided some practical knowledge for people who manage WiFi networks.
Recheck – IPv6 Security
The IPv6 penetration ratio in Japan has reached more than 10%. IPv6 is increasing its presence in production networks. As there are not many case studies on IPv6 security, not much attention is given to this topic. However, we need to have the exact same vigilance for IPv6 that we have for IPv4.
This session shared theoretical information on IPv6 security, IPv6 security measures based on operational experiences, and IPv6 security from network equipment vendors’ point of view.
DNSSEC Validation – starting it from today
Japan expects an increase of DNNSEC implementation by ISPs and other organizations toward the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
This tutorial focused on DNSSEC validation, which directly relates to end user protection. It shared how to enable DNSSEC validation in the currently working DNS resolver (cache DSN server) by building up knowledge step-by-step.
Topics included: DNSSEC overview, how to enable DNSSEC validation, and Root Key Signing Key (KSK) in currently working DNS cache servers.
IP Meeting
The IP Meeting for 2015 was, as always, held on the last day of Internet Week as a plenary session. Internet operational issues such as routing topology, traffic, security incidents in Japan and also worldwide were shared to seek future operational directions. An overview of Internet governance activities and security events in 2015 were shared as well.
The topics “Cultivation of human resources for the next generation” and “Internet and Artificial Intelligence – its Future” were selected as plenary panel sessions. Experts on the topics were invited as speakers and shared their thoughts on how AI can be used in the Internet industry in the future.
It may be too soon to talk about IW2016, but it is certain that it will be another great Internet conference in Japan.
Thanks for contributions from Tomoko Nezu (PR Manager, JPNIC)
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