Team NLnet Labs

Proudly serving the Internet community for over 20 years with open source core infrastructure tools for DNS and BGP

Newsletter Featured

The NLnet Labs Newsletter – Spring 2022

Welcome to our first newsletter, providing you with an update on what we've been doing over the last few months and what's coming up from your favourite open-source development crew below sea level. 👷‍♀️ In this edition: both our software development and Internet Governance activities get reinforced

Research

Journeying into XDP: Fully-fledged DNS service augmentation

By Willem Toorop In our previous post on using eXpress Data Path (XDP) for DNS, we discussed how a new XDP rate-limiting queries feature can augment a DNS service running in user space (with common DNS software) to deal with denial of service (DoS) attacks. Journeying into XDP: Part 0Network

Krill

Braving the Waves with Krill

If you have the luxury that your RIR, NIR or some other organisation offers an RPKI Publication Server that you can use, well then you're in luck. You would only need to set up a Krill CA instance – you can pretty much follow the guide we wrote for

Krill

Testing the Waters with Krill

We sometimes hear that people have cold feet when it comes to trying out Krill. But, did you know that Krill is at its most prolific in arctic oceans? So, come join us as we guide you through getting started with a Krill instance in a safe and secluded testbed

Krill

Making a Krill Sanctuary

We sometimes hear that people have cold feet when it comes to trying out Krill on the open ocean, so we decided to create a safe and secluded sanctuary. If you just want to run a Krill instance under this environment, then please read " Testing the Waters with Krill

Krill

Dishing up Krill

RPKI Certification Authorities (CAs) publish their RPKI related content using a so-called Publication Server, which in turn makes the 'publication point' for this and all other CAs it serves available in an RPKI Repository. These repositories are served to Relying Party (RP) software for RPKI validation using rsync

Routing Featured

Of Donkeys, Mules & Horses

A quest for the perfect data-structure to store and retrieve a full table of IP Prefixes, while maintaining the hierarchical relations.

RPKI

How To Run Krill Behind an NGINX Reverse Proxy

Although Krill has a built-in HTTPS server, it may be desirable to run a production grade webserver as a reverse proxy in front of Krill. This allows easy TLS configuration and additional restrictions, if desired.

DNS

Supporting DNSSEC Key Signing Ceremonies

Over the past decade, uptake of DNSSEC has grown significantly. The vast majority of top-level domains (TLDs) is now DNSSEC-signed. While key signing ceremonies are now deployed in many places in the DNSSEC community, what is lacking is a common approach, especially related to tooling.

RPKI

Moving RPKI Beyond Routing Security

Resource Tagged Attestations, or RTAs, are a new type of RPKI object that is being proposed by authors from APNIC and NLnet Labs in the IETF. They allow any arbitrary file to be signed ‘with resources’ by one or more parties.

RPKI

Introducing JDR: explore, inspect and troubleshoot the RPKI

Today we launch the first version of JDR, our hosted tool to check anything in the RPKI. While not yet 100% feature complete, we think it already offers useful insights to operators and implementors, and moreover, we would like their input and ideas for further developments of JDR. In this

DNS

SAD DNS and NLnet Labs DNS software

Update 18 November 2021: we are aware of the follow-up paper published by the researchers. The text below remains accurate for Unbound users. Please note that Unbound 1.13.2 and newer has IPv6 PMTU disabled  for UDP. During the ACM CCS conference 2020, held November 9-13, researchers from UC

RPKI

Why Routinator Doesn’t Fall Back to Rsync

When creating software, we carefully weigh each design decision: security, resiliency, usability and many more factors play a role in the end result. This article explores the reasoning behind a behaviour that isn't specified in an RFC but which has significant impact on operators deploying RPKI.

Research

Journeying into XDP Part 1: Augmenting DNS

How can eXpress Data Path (XDP) augment existing DNS software? We share our experiences of implementing Response Rate Limiting in XDP.

RPKI

Testing .. 123 Delegated RPKI

Validate your delegated RPKI deployment with the new NLnet Labs RPKI test root.

DNS

DNS-over-HTTPS in Unbound

A major step forward in end user privacy.

DNS

Some Country for Old Men

An Unbound Story of Serving Expired Records.

Research

Journeying into XDP: Part 0

Network programming using XDP has been on our radar for a while now. As tooling around this technology has vastly improved, we decided that it was time to finally get our hands dirty and see what this technology is all about.

RPKI

Krill Gains Powerful ROA Management Based on BGP Routing

Create and maintain Route Origin Authorisations based on the BGP announcements with your address space.

Dev

IPv6 and Rust

How difficult is it to use Rust and its ecosystem to write network applications that support IPv6?

Research

Adapting Radix Trees

NLnet Labs continuously strives to push the performance of its products. Over the course of the past year we researched improvements to main-memory databases for our authorative nameserver, NSD.

DNS

Tuning NSD for even better performance

NLnet Labs is pleased to announce version 4.3.0 of NSD. This release contains, among bug fixes, features to tune NSD for even better performance. Most notably, processor affinity.

RPKI

Evolving Krill

Introducing Krill 0.5.0 ‘Serve no Turf’, which includes a user interface for easy management and many other improvements.

DNS

Response Policy Zones in Unbound

We are incredibly happy to introduce Unbound 1.10. This release features RPZ, a mechanism that makes it possible to define your local policies in a standardized way, and load your policies from external sources.

Misc

On adopting a Code of Conduct for NLnet Labs

At NLnet Labs, we have recently adopted a code of conduct that applies to all our projects and the interactions with our community. In this blog post, we discuss why we did this, how we went about the process and what we learned along the way.