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Dns

A Solution for Authoritative DNS

I’ve been thinking about improving my DNS setup. So many things will use e-mail verification as a backup authentication measure that it is starting to show as a real weak point. An Ars Technica article earlier this year talked about how “[f]ederal authorities and private researchers are alerting companies to a wave of domain hijacking attacks that use relatively novel techniques to compromise targets at an almost unprecedented scale.”

The two attacks that are mentioned in that article, changing the nameserver and changing records, are something that DNSSEC could protect against. Records wouldn’t have to be changed on my chosen nameservers, a BGP-hijacking could just give another server the queries for records on my domain instead and then reply with whatever it chooses.

Free Software Efforts (2018W28)

Last week was my second week working full time in the Metrics team at Tor Project.

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

Tor Project

Relay Search Fixes

A few fixes for Relay Search. These were all small fixes but hopefully should also be quite high impact for usability.

Onionoo Enhancements

The improvements to Onionoo’s reverse DNS resolver have now been finalised and merged. The plan is that this will be deployed next week.

I have added support to Onionoo to filter relays by operating system. This was the oldest open Onionoo ticket until it was fixed.

Free Software Efforts (2018W27)

Last week was my first week working full time in the Metrics team at Tor Project.

On Tuesday, my Internet connection was interrupted for the entire workday which did make it a little more difficult to work. I was able to use my 4G connection but, unfortunately, access to the Tor bug tracker and all of the Metrics websites were blocked requiring me to verify I was over the age of 18 to access. Tor Browser was quite happy to go around the censorship so it was not impossible to work.