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pjf

3,099 karma · joined February 1, 2008

www.foremski.pl doing www.bgpipe.org etc.
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pjf··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
I'm pushing the https://bgpipe.org/ project, bringing one of the first BGP ASPA route path validators to the open source world - see:

- https://bgpipe.org/stages/aspa/

- https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-management...

pjf··on Revocation of X.509 Certificates
There are situations [1] where you could reliably BGP-hijack the IP prefix of the target domain authoritative nameserver, and obtain your own domain-validated cert for the target (by effectively controlling the zone file contents). And yeah, CAs do have their BGP protections, but still there's at least partial assumption BGP is secure enough to run DNS-based validation for new SSL certs, in our world where DNSSEC is still rare.

  [1] https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/104/slides/slides-104-maprg-dns-observatory-monitoring-global-dns-for-performance-and-security-pawel-foremski-and-oliver-gasser-00.pdf (see slide 15; yeah, it's already a bit old, yet still the case from my practice)
pjf··on Revocation of X.509 Certificates
On the other front (Chrome), their crlset-tools [1] just fetched me 64k (~1.1MiB) of revoked certs just fine, contrary to the article (quote: "After retrieving and running this tool, I was surprised to see a total of 1,081 revoked certificate serial numbers in this list. This seems oddly low.")

[1] https://github.com/agl/crlset-tools

pjf··on Revocation of X.509 Certificates
Good that at least BGP is secure.
pjf··on IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
NB: this is not "IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark" but "availability of IPv6 connectivity among Google users", which is a very important difference. This means roughly half of Google users have IPv6 capability, which does not 1:1 correspond how much traffic is actually transferred over IPv6, which is what this submission says in the title.
pjf··on How far can you go with IX Route Servers only?
great post! key points for me:

1. 100 IXes alone would get 56% IPv4 and 61% IPv6 prefixes, but ~14% reachability

2. little uniqueness between exchanges: not many new prefixes after the top 5

3. for outbound-heavy networks IXes are great, but to attract traffic they are not (edit: applies to automatic peering via route servers)

pjf··on The Day the Telnet Died
Kind of "funny" affected service is BGP RouteViews CLI access, still running over telnet: https://archive.routeviews.org/ (scroll to bottom of the page)

Isn't this one of the remaining, "legit" uses of the Telnet protocol on TCP/23 port over the public Internet?

pjf··on Show HN: BGP Scout – BGP Network Browser
One reason is there already was exabgp, written in Python, which in my experience is slow and resource hungry. Golang is much faster, easily portable, and produces static binaries (easy to deploy).

Another thing is bgpipe speaks JSON to background (or even remote) packet processors, so basically you can use whatever language you want with it to drive your BGP routers.

pjf··on Show HN: BGP Scout – BGP Network Browser
I'd advise to first compare with:

- https://bgp.tools/ - https://bgproutes.io/ - https://bgp.he.net/ - https://radar.qrator.net/ - https://github.com/nttgin/BGPalerter

...all of which are (usually) free. IMHO you should have a competing product + money strategy before you continue. Many people have tried (and failed) to make money off BGP.

BTW, author of https://bgpipe.org/ here, an open-source BGP data tool

pjf··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
https://bgpipe.org/

I'm working on a man in the middle proxy for BGP, which can fix and inspect routing sessions on the fly. Like a firewall for the BGP control plane.

pjf··on Google 8.8.8.8 is getting 27M ping requests per second
...prepare your pagers for an April 1st "experiment"
pjf··on Daylight Computer – New 60fps e-paper tablet
Do you know - and can share - how this compares vs the Onyx Boox Tab Ultra C Pro?

I guess it might be a very competitive alternative to your product, yet it can't reach 60+fps and is sketchy in terms of security, imho.

pjf··on JPEG DCT Text Lossifizer
Related posts by the author:

* https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/afternoon-project-jpeg-dct-te...

* https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/not-so-fast-mr-fourier

pjf··on Multi-database support in DuckDB
What are the limits on the number of databases (say sqlite files) one can have attached (and queried through a UNION) at a single time?
pjf··on Show HN: Hucksh – A shell with a very good memory
Small world : - ) Great work, Larry!
pjf··on Golang 1.20rc1 released, deprecates rand.Seed()
Quote:

  - math/rand
  The math/rand package now automatically seeds the global 
  random number generator (used by top-level functions like 
  Float64 and Int) with a random value, and the top-level 
  Seed function has been deprecated. Programs that need a 
  reproducible sequence of random numbers should prefer to 
  allocate their own random source, using 
  rand.New(rand.NewSource(seed)).
  (...)
pjf··on “The owner of this iPhone was in a severe car crash” amusement park fail
Full story: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-owner-of-this-iphone-was-in...
pjf··on Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again
Kentik data on the outage: https://twitter.com/DougMadory/status/1471162450649223173
pjf··on The internet is held together with spit and baling wire
Come on, who in 2021 actively drops routes because of an entry in the Level3 IRR? I mean, IMHO, it's not close to impacting the whole Internet.
pjf··on Cloudflare's Disruption
> Cloudflare’s unique advantages in a world where the Internet is increasingly fragmented

Wait, it's the opposite, at least on the infrastructure side. The Internet is increasingly centralized, due to Cloudflare and other big players.

pjf··on Masscan: TCP port scanner, scanning entire Internet in under 5 minutes
https://www.entropy-ip.com/ https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04327
pjf··on Masscan: TCP port scanner, scanning entire Internet in under 5 minutes
https://ipv6hitlist.github.io/

First time to be called shady, though ;)

pjf··on A Cyrillic orthography for the Polish language
Great improvement over the ROT13 encryption.
pjf··on Intel x86 Root of Trust: Loss of Trust
Can someone please explain the implications in layman terms?
pjf··on Experimenting with same-provider DNS-over-HTTPS upgrade
...and you think the sequence and timing of IP addresses your machine connects to alone can't be used to easily infer the website you're browsing? Neither DoH nor ESNI will make you more secure/private, but DoH will definitely make some companies more powerful. That's not the Internet as we knew it until now.
pjf··on Some bad news for DANE and DNSSEC
In practice I found new certs being available for download from CT logs hours after they've been issued. This is more than enough to perform an attack.

Another point is that CTs alone won't prevent the attacks nor inform you about a problem - they need a monitoring system.

(yes I know that's not the problem with CT - it's great, just trying to justify a strong opinion of "it doesn't work")

pjf··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2019)
Farsight Security, Inc. | Sr Software Engineer | C, Python, Golang, more | US, Worldwide | Full-Time, REMOTE

Farsight Security, lead by Paul Vixie, is all about DNS and security. We provide the world’s largest real-time actionable threat intelligence information on how the Internet is changing, seeing more than 200,000 DNS-related observations per second.

We are looking for a Senior Distributed Systems Engineer to join our development team distributed around the world.

Details at https://www.farsightsecurity.com/about-farsight-security/job...

pjf··on India’s largest bank SBI leaked account data on millions of customers
Quote: "But the bank had not protected the server with a password, allowing anyone who knew where to look to access the data on millions of customers’ information."
pjf··on Poland in the 80's Through the Lens of French/Swiss Photographer Bruno Barbey
...a lens biased towards countryside, and that would require captions to better understand the meaning of photos, IMHO.
pjf··on Five Years at the Edge: Watching Internet from the ISP Network
Full paper: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3281433
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