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PING

APNIC

PING is a podcast for people who want to look behind the scenes into the workings of the Internet. Each fortnight we will chat with people who have built and are improving the health of the Internet.
The views expressed by the featured speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC.

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  • 25 episodes
  • fortnightly
  • Avg 40 min
  • English

Episodes 25

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  • January 21 · 30 min

    NITK Students at IETF: Fresh Minds for standards development

    Welcome back to PING for 2026 and season 6. This time on PING, we have a pair of interviews with students from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal (NITK), recorded last year at IETF 122. This is the second time we've heard from students from NITK. We previously heard from Vanessa Fernandes and Kavya Bhat when they attended IETF 119 in 2024. NITK is a large, technically focused university located on India’s south-western coast in the state of Karnataka. The state is home to major technology hubs, such as Bengaluru and Mangaluru, alongside institutions like NITK, which play a key role in developing technical talent. Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising that NITK students show a strong interest in network technologies and Internet protocol development. Dr Mohit Tahiliani, Associate Professor at NITK, has led a multi-year program involving undergraduate, postgraduate, and postdoctoral researchers to engage with emerging Internet standards. Through this program, participants explore new ideas, contribute code, and take part in IETF hackathons and Working Group activities. This work has been supported in part by the APNIC Foundation. Last time with Vanessa and Kavya, we explored NITK’s multi-year campus IPv6 deployment, which has been underway for some time. That work has included direct engagement with the IETF, with Dr Mohit Tahiliani’s students attending alongside Nalini Eklins, who is involved both in the IPv6 deployment at NITK and in IPv6 standards work within the IETF. Since then, both students have gone on to work in networking roles or to pursue further study, reflecting the longer-term impact of sustained involvement in operational and standards-based Internet engineering. This time, we've got two different projects and NINE students to hear from. The first group is Rati Preethi Subramanian, Shriya Anil, Mahati Kalale, Anuhya Murki and Supradha Bhat, who explored fair queuing disciplines, FQ_Codel, a derivative FQ_Codel++ and a new proposed model, FQ_Pie. They worked with the NS3 network simulator and CCPerf, exploring how these queueing disciplines compare, and discussed their project with me at IETF 122. The second group are Vartika T Rao, Hayyan Arshad, Siddharth Bhat and Bharadwaja Meherrushi Chittapragada, who looked at the YANG data model in the network management space, and more efficient ways to manage data coming out of networking systems using YANG. They wrote a producer-consumer model in Python code, and explored time-series databases using interface packet count collections as an example YANG dataset to explore, in the CBOR encoding. Finally, I spoke with Dr Mohit Tahiliani, who has been leading this project. He is strongly committed to bringing new and younger voices into IETF work, recognizing the value of exposing students to real-world protocol development early in their careers. This experience benefits participants by grounding their learning in practical standards work, while also helping the IETF engage with new contributors who may return to protocol development in the future. This sustained engagement has already had tangible outcomes: The students involved have gone on to roles in the ICT sector or to further academic study, demonstrating the long-term value of this collaborative model.

    • Transcript
  • Dec 10, 2025 · 54 min

    Going Dark: measurement when the Internet hides the detail

    In the final podcast for 2025, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the problem of independent measurement in an Internet which is increasingly “going dark”. Communications has always included a risk of snooping, and a matching component of work to enhance privacy, from the simplest ciphers used in ancient times, techniques of hiding and discovering messages, attempts to prevent and detect intrusion of the mail, to adoption of telegraph codes, the cutting of telegraph wires in wartime (to force messages into radio where they could be listened to) and the development of modern encryption algorithms typically using the public-private keypair model. There has always been a story of “attack” and “response” in how we communicate privately. Aside from matters of state security, banking and finance at large depend on a degree of privacy and now require it under legislation to enable use of creditcard information online. Many other contexts have an assumption of privacy, and use technology to try and preserve it. Fundamentally, individuals in their use of the Internet are entitled to expect a level of privacy where the state permits it. The publication of RFC7258 “Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack in 2014 formalised a belief that the intrusion of third parties into a communication between two ends demanded a technology response to exclude them, where possible. Protocol designers and Internet Engineers took up the challenge. This position led over time to a marked increase in the adoption of privacy enhancing protocol features. For example, the web moved from HTTP: denoted URLs to HTTPS: where the content is protected by the Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption protocol, which now overwhelmingly predominates in the at large. However, significant aspects of Internet communications “leak” information to third parties. Between an individual and a web service lies their provider, unknown numbers of intermediate providers, typically a content distribution system hosting the web site in a local copy, all of whom have opportunities to see and understand what is being done, and by whom. In particular the DNS typically exposes the name and address of the site being connected to across all kinds of protocols (not just the web) and exposes it to unknown intermediary systems as the DNS lookup is processed. In response to this, services are emerging which break down the DNS into dissociated queries: what is being looked for, and who is looking for it, and use intermediary services which may know one, but not both: Questions are seen to be asked, but by who is now hidden. If you know who is asking, you don’t know what they are asking for. Combined with newer network protocols like QUIC which imposes a strong end-to-end encryption model which even hides the inter-packet size and timing information (another form of leak which can be used to reconstruct what kind of traffic is flowing) it has become increasingly hard for an independent researcher to see inside the network: It’s going dark. Geoff explores the nature of privacy in the Internet at large, and how APNIC Labs gets round this problem with it’s measurement system. PING will return in January 2026 with another season of episodes. Until then, enjoy this final recording of 2025, and see you online, in the new year.

    • Transcript
  • Nov 26, 2025 · 38 min

    Adjusting for data source bias in Internet Measurements

    This time PING features Emile Aben from the RIPE NCC R&D Department. Emile is a Senior Research Engineer, and for over a decade and a half has been looking at Internet Measurement at RIPE in the Atlas system, and in the RIPE RIS BGP data collection. Emile and a collaborator Romain Fontugne from IIJ Labs in Tokyo have been exploring a model of the influence and effect on global connectivity in BGP for different AS, based on the impact they have on other AS’s transit choices. They call this “AS Hegemony” and Emile has been using it to adjust for sample bias in the data being collected in RIPE RIS and in the Atlas network. This approach to re-balancing the sources helps Emile to understand changes in network topology and routing under rapid shocks like cable cuts and he’s been applying this to the recent spate of cable outages in the Baltic, around Africa, and the power outage on the Iberian Peninsula. Emile has also been looking at new ways of holding data, and visualising data. His RIPE colleague Ties de Kok has explored use of “Parquet” as a data abstraction tool and this has allowed Emile to perform rapid analysis and experiment in new data visualisations in 3D, rendered in-browser.

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  • Nov 12, 2025 · 52 min

    the Realpolitik of undersea cables

    In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston explores the complex landscape of undersea cables. They have always had a component of strategic interest, communications and snooping on communications has been a constant since writing was invented, and the act of connecting two independent nation states by a telegraph wire invokes questions of ownership and jurisdiction right from the start. After the initial physics of running a long distance wire to make an electric circuit was worked out, telegraph services became a vital part of a states economic and information gathering processes. This is why at the beginning of world war 1 and again in world war 2 the submarine cables linking europe out into the world were cut by the British Navy: forcing the communications flows into radio meant it was possible to listen in, and with luck (and some smart people) decode the signals. Modern day fibre optic communications are no different in this regard. Many incidents of cable cutting have simple explanations, not all paths the subsea cables run through are especially deep and in shallow waters near landfall with lots of fish, trawlers cause a lot of damage. But there is now good reason to believe state actors are also disrupting fiber communications by breaking links, and a strong trend now to direct which sources of equipment (from the physical fibre up to the active routing systems) are used for a landfall into any given economy. This in turn is influencing the flow of capital, and the paths taken by subsea fibre systems, as a result of the competing pressures.

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  • Oct 29, 2025 · 36 min

    Greasing the wheels

    In this episode of PING, Shumon Huque from Salesforce discusses how protocols with extensible flag fields can benefit from regular testing of the values possible in the packet structure. This technique is known as "greasing" and has a strong metaphorical meaning of "greasing the wheels" to ensure future uses aren't blocked by mistaken beliefs about the possible values. Intermediate systems (so-called "middleboxes") have to try and determine "risky" packetflows, and one of the mechanisms they use is to consider unexpected values in the known packetflows as possibly dangerous. This is an over-simplistic approach, and risks "ossifying" a protocol into the range of values which are actively in use now. Protocols usually include extra potential values for flag-fields, settings, options and the like, and these frequently have a large range of "reserved" values which are held in trust in an IANA registry, for future use. Greasing is a proposed mechanism to test out some of these values, and see what happens "on the wire" for the protocol in question. Shumon and his co-author and collaborator Mark Andrews from ISC have been applying the greasing model to the DNS, and we talked about it's history in other protocols, and how in practice greasing can be applied on the global internet.

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Showing 21–25 of 25 episodes