Bert Hubert

Biography

Bert Hubert has a 15 year track record in commercial and open source software development. He started his career by hacking the first cable Internet provider in his university town of Delft, and accepting a contracting job to improve things.

As part of the original team, he helped scale Casema Internet from 50 to 50000 users – a very large number at the time. This led to the commercial development of 'Pinguin', a very early interactive service level monitoring application for the Casema cable modem userbase. Pinguin was subsequently licensed to two other cable companies, and saw wide use until monitoring functionality was integrated into core ISP platforms.

Afterwards PowerDNS.COM BV was launched in 1999 to create an innovative database backed nameserver implementation, with global server load balancing applications.  Although originally a commercial failure as closed source, today, the open source PowerDNS serves around 30% of all Internet domain names world wide.  In addition, hundreds of millions of ISP subscribers are serviced by the PowerDNS Resolver.

In 2006, the Fox Replay venture was launched with Fox-IT, a leading edge Dutch security company.  Today in 2011, Fox Replay BV supplies some of the leading governments in the world with IP interception analysis solutions & services.

Bert studied physics at Delft University of Technology and was a member of the board of the student body, tasked with coordinating industry contacts & sponsorship. As part of his duties he organized the then largest career fair for engineering students in Europe. Bert nearly completed the equivalent of a Bachelor degree before dropping out to start his own company.

Presentation: DNSSEC: Reality & Utility - what problems does it solve today?

DNS, the "phonebook of the internet", has recently received a security upgrade called DNSSEC. Deploying DNSSEC adds a lot of complexity, but also delivers the ability to put vastly more trust in the authenticity of DNS results.

This presentation briefly rehashes the current status & goals of DNSSEC, and outlines threats that are mitigated by DNSSEC 'out of the box'.

Additionally, there will be specific focus on what other real-life problems & challenges could be addressed with DNSSEC.  As an example, the current doubts about the plethora of Certificate Authorities underlying SSL could be addressed using the DNSSEC 'DANE' technology.