The ENOG 12/RIPE NCC Regional Meeting took place from 3-4 October 2016 at the Armenia Marriott Hotel in Yerevan. A total of 251 attendees from 18 countries participated in the meeting, 177 of whom were from Armenia.
The meeting was hosted by the RIPE NCC and Armix and was sponsored by Ucom Armenia, ISOC, Arpinet, ISOC Armenia and the Union of Information Technology Enterprises (UITE).
The meeting was opened by Gagik Tadevosyan, Deputy Minister of Transport, Communication and Information Technologies and Vahan Martirosyan, Minister of Transport, Communication and Information Technologies. They welcomed the audience and briefly discussed the importance of the Internet industry in the modern world. Vahan Hovsepyan, from Armix, then addressed the audience, emphasising that he was proud of Armenia’s strong recent Internet infrastructure growth. The last welcome talk was from Sergey Myasoedov, Chair of the ENOG Programme Committee (PC).
The distinctive characteristic of this event was the high number of talks devoted to various aspects of security. This began with the very first plenary talk by Paul Vixie, Farsight Security, concerning the techniques of using DNS to detect and prevent malicious activities on the Internet. Later, Alex Smirnoff, Open Network Association, presented his approach to vulnerability risk management to build new tools and made a proposal to his audience to combine efforts on this project. Kevin Meynell, Deploy360 team, described his experience of interactions with national Computer Security and Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) as national-level points of coordination. Following that, Artyom Gavrichenkov, Qrator Labs, delivered the talk “DDoS Attacks in 2017: Beyond Packet Filtering”, which provided new data concerning trends in DDoS attacks over the last year and also described popular mistakes in DDoS mitigation.
The traditional ENOG topics (IXPs, connectivity, DNSSEC and IPv6) were also well covered during the meeting. Timothy Denton, Hurricane Electric, discussed ways in which governmental telecom regulators can regard IXPs. This topic was continued the next day during the traditional IXP panel, which was moderated Alexander Isavnin, The Open Net. Panelists Vahan Hovsepyan, Armix, Martin Semrad, NIX.CZ/NIX.SK, and Eugene Morozov, MSK-IX, shared their thoughts on running IXPs today and in the future. Panelist George Gotoshia, Newtelco Georgia, announced the creation of the first IXP in Georgia, with eight local participants.
All presentations about connectivity analysed the regional status quo from different points of view. Alexander Azimov, Qrator Labs, investigated connectivity and the reliability of autonomous systems using the RIPE Atlas system. He proved that observed latencies between ASes in the ENOG region are much higher than calculated under the assumption of optimal interconnectivity. He also demonstrated that the data paths between countries are poorly localised, with traffic from the region sometimes passing through Western Europe and the US before arriving at its local destination.
Alexander Isavnin presented possible absolute metrics for the quantitative representation of connectivity at country level and illustrated his talk with figures for the countries in the ENOG region. RACI fellow Talgat Nurlybayev, Kazakhstan Research and Education Network Association, gave a lightning talk concerning routing issues caused by partial incompatibility of networking equipment treating 64-bit numbers of autonomous systems.
Two talks were devoted to DNSSEC, both presented by ICANN. Richard Lamb described the case of DNSSEC implementation and concomitant considerations, and performed a cost, benefit and risk analysis. Alexandra Kulikova then familiarised the audience with the plans of rolling the new Key Signing Key (KSK) for root zones. The current KSK was rolled in 2010, when the root zone was signed for the first time. Alexandra gave an overview of five documents covering the procedure.
Hisham Ibrahim, RIPE NCC, presented his analysis of IPv6 adoption in ENOG region. He mentioned that Russia succeeded in absolute numbers while Ukraine performed better in terms of percentage of LIRs announcing IPv6. Armenia is the leader in IPv6 RIPEness, with 50% of LIRs having 4-stars. Unfortunately, there are still four countries without IPv6 deployment at all.
In his RIPE NCC Update, Axel Pawlik, RIPE NCC, mentioned the number of LIRs is growing (14,448 in September 2016 vs. 12,652 in September 2015) and that close to half of the current RIPE NCC membership base is no longer classic ISPs/telcos. Axel went on to emphasise the importance of supporting local NOGs, particularly ENOG.
The IANA stewardship transition was discussed in detail at the special roundtable, moderated by Anton Baskov, ENOG Programme Committee. First, Oleg Demidov, PIR Center, presented the history of the issue along with the activities behind it and outcomes for the Internet community. Next, a talk by Michael Yakushev, ICANN, took stock of the transition process. Following this, the moderator invited Alex Pawlik, Dmitry Burkov, RIPE NCC Executive Board, and Dmitry Kohmanyuk, Hostmaster Ltd., to share their thoughts regarding the process.
An active discussion took place during the Birds of a Feather session, “RIPEstat as a Tool”. Alex Semenyaka, RIPE NCC, presented the current state, goals and roadmap of the RIPEstat project, and asked the audience for feedback on feature requests.
There were also two talks devoted to new ways of using the classical DNS system. Yuri Kargapolov, UANIC, described the technique of using the DNS for modern MNP realisations. In his lightning talk on the Internet of Things (IoT), Richard Lamb speculated on how the DNS could be used for provisioning and managing IoT networks.
The meeting presentations 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.
The RIPE NCC also requested feedback from attendees on how it could improve further meetings.
The ENOG 13/RIPE NCC Regional Meeting will take place in St. Petersburg, Russia from 23-24 May 2017.
This post is also available in: Russian
