Meeting Report

ENOG 15/RIPE NCC Regional Meeting took place from 4-5 June 2018 in Moscow. The meeting was hosted by the RIPE NCC and MSK-IX.

A total of 498 attendees from 21 different countries participated in the event. Although Russia was by far the best represented country (with 417 attendees checked in), we also saw a good number of individuals from the US, Ukraine, Armenia, Germany, Great Britain, Belarus and Moldova. Over a third of those attending were newcomers to ENOG Meetings.

Also joining us at the meeting were sixteen members of staff from the RIPE NCC and newly elected member of the RIPE NCC Executive Board, Piotr Strzyżewski.

The meeting opened with welcome talks from Axel Pawlik (RIPE NCC), Elena Voronina (MSK-IX, local host), and Sergey Myasoedov (ENOG PC Chair). Axel then took to the podium a second time to give an update on the RIPE NCC’s activities, tools and services, with a focus on the current growth of the RIPE NCC membership, its impact on the remaining pool of IPv4 addresses, developments in the transfer market, and IPv6 adoption.

This was the first ENOG meeting at which attendees had been able to make use of the RIPE Networking App. In the first of two lightning talks, Adam Castle (RIPE NCC) stepped up to introduce the audience to the app, which allows its users to search for, message, and schedule meetings with other meeting attendees. In all, 93 attendees at ENOG 15 used the app, sending 165 messages, and booking 100 meetings. For the second lightning talk, Gergana Petrova (RIPE NCC) presented on the RIPE Academic Cooperation Initiative (RACI) calling on researchers in the field of Internet technology to share their research with the RIPE community.

Ignas Bagdonas (Equinix), Jeff Tantsura (Nuage Networks) and Alexey Melnikov (Isode Limited) gave a joint talk on operators at IETF. The talk was intended as a report on the progress that has been made within the IETF in response to feedback the organisation received from the operators community back in 2014. The speakers were keen to acknowledge the concerns that had been raised at that time, and to shed light on new architectural and technical solutions geared towards overcoming the issues. The panel discussion initiated an open and productive dialogue between the speakers and the meeting attendees.

The plenary sessions throughout the day focused on a variety of technical and operational topics of vital importance to the entire Internet community. First up, Dmitry Belyavskiy talked about a newer, safer, faster TLS 1.3 protocol, followed by Alexey Melnikov (IETF Area Director), who gave an update on the deployment of DMARC. The first RACI candidate to present at the meeting, Timothy Griffin (University of Cambridge), then presented a method for mitigating BGP Wedgies, which occur when local routing policies interact in such a way as to bring about unwanted instances of stable routing. The talk pointed back to Informational RFC 4264, jointly published by the speaker and Geoff Houston (APNIC). The session was wrapped up with a lightning talk from Andrey Vorobyev (.RU / .РФ Domain Coordination Center) on the issue of Universal Acceptance for IDN.

Following the lunch break, the focus turned towards the vulnerability of the Internet. Alexander Azimov (Qrator Labs) highlighted the very real threats DDoS attacks pose for the stability of the Internet. The talk was aimed at identifying the source of the problem – i.e. poorly configured services that act as DDoS amplifiers. There were a number of constructive responses from the room with regards the options he presented for tackling this threat. Broadening the scope of the topic of vulnerabilities in the Internet, a panel discussion entitled ‘Why is the Internet Still Online?’ looked into hijacking, spoofing, general connectivity problems, and a variety of other issues. The participants, Martin J. Levy (Cloudflare), Ignas Bagdonas (Equinix), Alex Semenyaka (RIPE NCC) and Alexander Asimov, provided an authoritative overview of the issues they see in their own networks, and discussed the gap between ideal solutions and current real-world practices.

With the plenary sessions completed for the day, attendees split across two rooms for a Netconf/YANG tutorial on network programmability and an ROA Signing Party workshop. To end the day, a well-attended BoF session moderated by Alexander Isavnin explored various questions and problems surrounding Russian Internet regulations, looking into what exactly gets regulated by the state, how regulations affect networks, and what technical measures need to be implemented in Russia to achieve compliance with local regulations.

The ENOG 15 dinner took place at the Yar restaurant, where attendees came together to network and make new connections, and also to enjoy a traditional local show in the renowned theatre over food and drinks.

The first session of the second day was a first for ENOG meetings, with a remote talk from Jen Linkova (Google). In a prerecorded presentation, Jen discussed the most common scenarios of connecting an enterprise network to multiple ISPs using IPv6 address space assigned by an ISP. Jen then tuned in via Skype from Australia to take questions from the Moscow audience. The second RACI talk of the meeting, from Luca Vassio (Politecnico di Torino) looked at possibilities for building user profiles in the face of challenges arising from encryption at the application layer. Luca outlined a machine learning methodology capable, when approached with a certain degree of ingenuity, of achieving this with a remarkably high degree of accuracy.

Christian Teuschel’s (RIPE NCC) talk provided a country view on Russia, as a follow-up to his previous presentation giving a country view of Belarus at ENOG 14. The talk focused on the intersection between Internet and economy in Russia, examining IPv4 depletion and IPv6 adoption on the basis of information made available by RIPEstat. Christian also gave an overview of RIPE Atlas coverage in Russia and allowed us a glimpse of the Russian Internet through the lens of IXP Country Jedi.  This was followed by a lightning talk on IPv6 deployment in Central Asia from the Central Asian Research and Education Network (CAREN), presented by RACI candidate Almaz Bakenov (American University of Central Asia).

Dmitrii Kovalenko (ididb.ru) presented a report aimed at exploring policies for import and export described in ASN objects used by Russian ISPs in RIPE DB. Martin Levy (Cloudflare) then gave us a talk on DNS resolver 1.1.1.1, which was announced by the organisation back on 1 April. Martin gave the audience a review of the offering and an update on how the routing for the address has been cleaned up globally. Edward Lewis (ICANN) then gave an update on the Root Zone DNSSEC Key Rollover. Denis Mikhlevich was last up before the lunch break with a lightning talk on Anycast Routing Implementation for Caching DNS Servers in Volga TTK MR.

Rebecca Class-Peter (Euro-IX) gave a talk on how the Internet eXchange Federation (IX-F) are tackling problems that have arisen in the past due to the lack of a globally authoritative and fully comprehensive system for IXP data. Rebecca showed how  IX-F has developed just such a system, which they aim to implement through cooperation with the Internet technical community. Arnold Nipper (PeeringDB) updated us on work being done at PeeringDB before Jeff Tantsura (Nuage Networks) talked to us about RIFT. We then returned to the earlier topic of amplification of DDoS attacks with Artyom Gavrichenkov (Qrator Labs) looking at memcached amplification. He took the audience through the causes and consequences of this new type of attack, and went through some of the ways to prevent repeat instances of it in the future.

On to the closing plenary, we began with two technical talks, one from Maxim Uvarov (Linaro Networking Group) on an open source API for network data plane applications called OpenDataPlane (ODP), and one from Cengiz Alaettinoglu (Packet Design) examining the role of machine learning in network monitoring and automation. The meeting ended with three lightning talks: Victor Naumov (RIPE NCC) took us through the tools both old and new on offer from the RIPE NCC, including the new RIPE IP Map, a tool for the geolocation of core Internet infrastructure; Alex Semenyaka (RIPE NCC) looked at RIPE Working Groups, explaining how they are formed, how they are structured, and what role they play in the wider Internet community; and, finally, we had Nishal Goburdhan (PCH.NET) talking on the operation of 9.9.9.9 DNS.

ENOG 15 was a huge success, providing attendees with a unique opportunity to discuss cutting edge developments in the Internet community, to delve into issues at large in the ENOG region, and to network with each other.

The meeting presentations discussed here were given in English and Russian. On-site translation facilities were provided to attendees. The presentations are available in the archive and session videos in both English and Russian are available on the ENOG YouTube Channel.