The APOPS 1 session at APRICOT 2023/APNIC 55 kicked off on Monday, 27 February 2023 with a cracker of a session. Here’s my hot take on the presentations.
Gautam Akiwate presented on attacks on the DNS infrastructure. The risks of operating DNS services have now been magnified by the ‘DNS query verification’ path for certification, which allows an attacker to leverage registry process (‘supply chain’ in logistical terms) attacks bypassing low-barrier walls, to get a TLS certificate issued for their bogus web or another service, which leapfrogs the usual ‘this certificate looks suspicious’ protections. This is a sophisticated attack process that targets high-value enterprises, often state or national infrastructure. It’s high-risk, high-value, high-consequence stuff.
Then, Mark Tinka spoke on the emergence of new submarine fibre transmission systems. Facing their own version of ‘Moore’s Law’, fibre technology has had to deal with several paradigm shifts in encoding and transmission technology and has now moved to a phase of deployment where Space Division Multiplexing (SDM) has come to the fore. Using the ability to put more bearers into the same physical cable, the bandwidth can now be managed to understand the physical distribution of signal channels over the discrete bearers in the bundle, to ensure the minimum overlap of signal and increase capacity per cable significantly, inside the current optical encoding technology limits.
Later, Jonathon Brewer spoke on the eternal ‘last mile problem’ which is a topic that’s often covered in regional meetings. Given the Asia Pacific region’s mix of developed, developing and emerging Internet economies and the sheer physical size of many locations of interest, delivery of Internet to ‘the next four billion’ has a significant concern in how much, and at what cost. Jonathon’s presentation confronted many of the assumptions we make about the availability of technology in the rural and remote problem space, and the class of solutions we’re likely to see adopted. It made a nice context-setter story to weigh up against the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite panel session held the next day.
Watch the recording of APOPS 1 at APRICOT 2023 now:
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