Jun.2024

Vol.

62

Executive Summary

Executive Summary

We present IIR Vol. 62, the first edition for 2024. For Japan, the year began with a huge earthquake that hit theNoto Peninsula. We offer our deepest sympathies to everyone affected by the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake.
On New Year’s Day afternoon, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake with a maximum seismic intensity of 7 destroyed local residents’ infrastructure in the blink of an eye. Telecommunications infrastructure was no exception. The four mobile carriers held a joint press conference to disclose the damage caused by the earthquake, including power outages to buildings and base stations and the disconnection of trunk and backhaul circuits. As has been pointed out during previous
disasters, the ability to use the Internet via smartphone as one would during normal times is crucial during emergencies. Reports coming out of the press conference, too, highlighted the fact that mobile communications are essential tousers, and that electrical power and optical fiber constitute the foundations on which such communications depend.
Physical steps, such as deploying mobile power supply vehicles and generators, are needed to furnish electric power,
but in this case, satellite communications stepped in as an alternative to backhaul circuits. Satellite mobile phones
have also been used during past disasters, but in the case of the recent earthquake, high-speed data communications
using low-orbit satellites were made available to function as base station backhaul circuits and Wi-Fi hotspots, andreports indicate this to have been extremely useful. This experience showed that, even in the broadband era, satellite-based wireless communications can be used to supplement optical fiber and terrestrial wireless communications.
The IIR introduces the wide range of technology that IIJ researches and develops, comprising periodic observation
reports that provide an outline of various data IIJ obtains through the daily operation of services, as well as focusedresearch examining specific areas of technology.
Chapter 1 presents our SOC Report, our periodic observation report for this edition. As usual, this report looks at security
incidents on which IIJ’s SOC focused its attention from among those that occurred in 2023. This is followed by twodiscussions looking at the SOC’s efforts to address certain challenges. The first looks at challenges with the Data
Analytics Platform that the SOC operates and the introduction of a tool called dbt. The second discusses a methodof enabling the visualization of C&C communications with a focus on time interval variability. I think you will findboth to be interesting accounts of some of the actual work that IIJ’s SOC carries out.
Our focused research report in Chapter 2 discusses a method of constructing sender reputation based on a paper titled“Sender Reputation Construction Method And Feedback Loop Using Sender Authentication,” presented at the Information
Processing Society of Japan. Email has been in widespread use since the Internet’s early days, and that remains true
today, and so there are strong social reasons for maintaining the security of email. The method proposed here onlyuses the results of sender authentication. There is no need to look at the content of email, which makes the method
valuable from a privacy perspective as well. The team behind this method obtained good results when testing it on real-world
emails too, which seems to validate the effectiveness of send authentication technology here.
The focused research report in Chapter 3 continues our series commemorating IIJ’s 30-year history, this time with a lookat data centers. The article walks through IIJ’s data center initiatives through the years, from the 1990s and the dawn of
the Internet era through to the 2020s and the rise of demands for carbon neutrality and AI in the data center. Technology
has evolved substantially over the past 30 years, and the Internet and society at large have undergone huge changes.
Data centers are an important piece of the infrastructure that has underpinned those changes, and we look back on those
30 years with the strong sense that they will continue to play that role in the future. I encourage you to read through.
Through activities such as these, IIJ strives to improve and develop its services on a daily basis while maintaining
the stability of the Internet. We will continue to provide a variety of services and solutions that our customers cantake full advantage of as infrastructure for their corporate activities.

Junichi Shimagami
Mr. Shimagami is a Senior Executive Officer and the CTO of IIJ. His interest in the Internet led to him joining IIJ in
September 1996. After engaging in the design and construction of the A-Bone Asia region network spearheaded by IIJ,
as well as IIJ’s backbone network, he was put in charge of IIJ network services. Since 2015, he has been responsible
for network, cloud, and security technology across the board as CTO. In April 2017, he became chairman of theTelecom Services Association of Japan’s MVNO Council, stepping down from that post in May 2023. In June 2021,
he also became a vice-chairman of the association.

© Internet Initiative Japan Inc.

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