This April 2022 issue contains five technical papers and two editorial notes.
The first technical paper, Data-Plane Security Applications in Adversarial Settings, by Liang Wang and colleagues, investigates security issues that may arise when creating and running data-plane applications for programmable switches. This work moves security analysis and design forward in this particular area. This paper also calls for a more thorough rethinking of security for data-plane applications for programmable switches.
The second technical paper, One Bad Apple Can Spoil Your IPv6 Privacy, by Said Jawad Saidi and colleagues, leverages IPv6 passive measurements to pinpoint that a non-negligible portion of devices encodes their MAC address in their IPv6 address. This threatens users’ privacy, allowing content providers and CDNs to consistently track users and their devices across multiple sessions and locations. Overall, the paper is an excellent contribution toward privacy-by-design solutions and a nicely executed measurements study that clarifies the problem and provides solid suggestions to mitigate the problem.
The third technical paper, Hyper-Specific Prefixes: Gotta Enjoy the Little Things in Interdomain Routing, by Khwaja Zubair Sediqi and colleagues, investigates the presence of high-specific prefixes (HSP) on the BGP Internet routing during the last decade. These prefixes are more-specific than /24 (/48) for IPv4 (IPv6) and are commonly filtered by Autonomous Systems operators. Overall this paper offers a nice contribution to the understanding of the BGP universe, with a clear message and a nice quantification of the phenomenon. The authors clearly present and motivate the work, offering also to not experts a nice view of the routing complexity of the internet nowadays.
The fourth technical paper, Programming Socket-Independent Network Functions with Nethuns, by Nicola Bonelli and colleagues, proposes a new solution to transparently develop packet-processing programs on top of different network I/O frameworks. The authors design and develop an open-source library, nethuns, serving as a unified programming abstraction for network functions that natively supports multi-core programming. Not only is this work very relevant to our community, but also the code is released open-source through a BSD license, which can be used to foster more research in the area, towards unifying programming mechanisms of end-host networking.
The fifth technical paper, Measuring DNS over TCP in the Era of Increasing DNS Response Sizes: A View from the Edge, by Mike Kosek and colleagues, studies one of the foundations of today’s Internet: the Domain Name Service (DNS). The original RFC document of DNS instructs to send queries either over UDP (DoUDP) or TCP (DoTCP). This paper presents a measurement study on DoTCP focusing on two perspectives: failure rates and response times.
Finally, we have two editorial notes. A Case for an Open Customizable Cloud Network, by Dean H. Lorenz and his colleagues, argues for the desirability of the new ecosystem of managed network solutions to connect to the Cloud, outlines the main requirements and sketches possible solutions. Recommendations for Designing Hybrid Conferences, by Vaibhav Bajpai and colleagues, presents guidelines and considerations–spanning technology, organization and social factors–for organizing successful hybrid conferences.
I hope that you will enjoy reading this new issue and welcome comments and suggestions on CCR Online (https://ccronline.sigcomm.org) or by email at ccr-editor at sigcomm.org.