Apricot-2018

Just back from APRICOT 2018. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, APNIC had its first Hackathon and it was fun (blog post of APNIC here). There was one project on the ranking of CDNs using RIPE Atlas data. To achieve this team was trying to find strings/hostnames which they can trace to and figure out nearby CDN. As part of that, I suggested them to look into www.facebook.com and carefully noting the sources from where elements get loaded. It’s quite common that Facebook.com (or Google.com for the logic) would be hosted on some server at a large PoP while FNA (or GGC) would serve only specific static content out of it. FNA, of course, sits on the IPs of the ISP hosting it. So in the source list, we found scontent.fktm1-1.fna.fbcdn.net and that gives an idea that FNA strings are around logic: scontent.fxxx1-1.fna.fbcdn.net where xxx is the airport code. 1-1 means 1st PoP in 1st ISP over there probably (strong guess!). If there are more FNA nodes in a given area, the number goes further up. The team used it and for now, the project is over. But while I was on the way back to India, I thought that this is very interesting data if we pull the full picture by querying all possible IATA airport codes with a logic. This logic can be used for two things:

Writing this post from my hotel room in Kathmandu. I found that many of the servers appear to be DNS resolvers which is unusual.
Have a look at these weird DNS replies:

dig @anuragbhatia.com . ns +short
a.root-servers.net.
b.root-servers.net.
c.root-servers.net.
d.root-servers.net.
e.root-servers.net.
f.root-servers.net.
g.root-servers.net.
h.root-servers.net.
i.root-servers.net.
j.root-servers.net.
k.root-servers.net.
l.root-servers.net.
m.root-servers.net.

dig @google.com . ns +short
b.root-servers.net.
c.root-servers.net.
d.root-servers.net.
e.root-servers.net.
f.root-servers.net.
g.root-servers.net.
h.root-servers.net.
i.root-servers.net.
j.root-servers.net.
k.root-servers.net.
l.root-servers.net.
m.root-servers.net.
a.root-servers.net.

This seems unusual and is the result of basically port 53 DNS hijack. Let’s try to verify it using popular “whoami.akamai.net” query.

APNIC and RIPE NCC are doing a hackathon at APRICOT 2018. It just started today with some light interaction with various participating members yesterday. The theme of the hackathon is around IPv6. Many cool projects were suggested yesterday and teams started working today on certain shortlisted projects like:

1. A tool for ranking CDNs - A tool based on RIPE Atlas data to rank CDNs based on latency across different regions.
2. An IPv6 fun word game - Where anyone with a member account can suggest a word, and compete with other members who share more IPv6 addresses. It may include things like showcasing creative use of hexadecimal strings in an IPv6 address like Facebook popularly does face:b00c in their IPv6 pools.
3. IPv4 and IPv6 network security  - Study of attacks and overall security in IPv6. It would involve study and possibly a report on various attack vectors in the IPv6 domain.
4. A countrywide report on IPv6 deployment - I have yet to see how it is different from existing other reports.
5. IPv6 tunnel detection - Figuring out where tunnels used and figuring out the IPv4 address of those endpoints via a javascript plugin and possibly comparing IPv4 Vs IPv6 performance.

Let’s see how things go in next 12hrs. Super fun. Things should show up on Github in next few hours. :)