The retransmission timeout plays an important role in allowing TCP to recover from segment losses. Over the years, extensions to TCP have been developed to reduce the reliance of TCP on the retransmission timer. Recently, a SIGCOMM paper proposed to use microsecond resolution timers in TCP. A recent IETF draft summarizes the discussions on TCP's retransmission timer, but surprisingly it does not discuss these microsecond resolution TCP timers.

Controlable per-Flow Load Balancing (CFLB) is an initiative to revisit current load-balancing techniques. These techniques suffer from the fact that they use hash-based functions to balance packet. This prevent hosts to control the path taken by their packets.

CFLB consists of an invertible mechanism that allows sources to easily steer packets over any load-balanced path. CFLB consists in multiple implementation parts:

* A Linux kernel implementation of the CFLB-router forwarding path.

In the following video, we show that it is easy (i.e. anybody can do it) to hijack FON user's sessions (i.e. access his Facebook, Twitter,... accounts) using a simple Firefox extension. You simply have to be connected on the same access point, which is an open access point in the case of FON and most hotspots.

The root servers of the Domain Name Systems are highly redundant. This redundancy is important to ensure that the root DNS service continues to be provided even if one of the DNS root servers fails. These servers are well maintained and fail rarely. However, on October 1st, the H instance of the root DNS servers maintained by the US Army failed.

See the cycle EID to locators association

See the cycle dates

Download the dataset

During the last week, two recent IETF drafts have proposed to simplify some important aspects of the operation of BGP.