Successful first GFCE Triple-I Meeting @IAS2018 Dakar

News item | 17-05-2018

On Monday 7th of May, during the Africa Internet Summit, AfricaCERT hosted the first GFCE Triple-I Internet Infrastructure Security Day. Participants were sought across regional Internet stakeholder groups, including government, business and technical community.

Please find a detailed report of the GFCE Triple-I here.

Recap of the GFCE Triple-I Meeting

The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate as a member of the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise coordinated this initiative to look for ways towards more trusted use of Internet and email in the African region. Participants in this workshop were regional Internet stakeholder groups, including government, business and technical community who all contributed in finding solutions to strengthen an open end-to-end Internet.
 

Official opening & welcome

The workshop was opened by Mr. Nii Quaynor. He played an important role in the introduction and development of the Internet throughout Africa. He also established some of Africa’s first Internet connections and was involved in setting up some key organisations, including the African Network Operators Group (AfNOG).

Improving the trusted Internet experience in the African region

Block I: Better Use of Today’s Open Internet Standards

• Alain Aina from WACREN
• Olaf Kolkman from ISOC

During the first block, Alain Aina (WACREN) and Olaf Kolkman (ISOC) moderated and discussed the use and usefulness of Open Internet Standards such as DNSSEC, TLS, DANE, DMARC, DKIM, SPF and IPv6, in interaction with the participants.
 

Block II: Inspiration from Good Practice Actions

• Ms. Octavia de Weerdt from NBIP.NL explained how the NBIP offers on-demand DDoS security for both small Internet providers, and medium-sized and larger businesses, as well as for VoIP providers that helps to put up a powerful resistance against DDoS attacks.
• Marcus Adomey from AfricaCERT stressed the importance of Incident response since more devices are put online and more incidents are received.
• Michuki Mwangi from ISOC talked about Mutually Agreed Norms of Routing Security (MANRS) and the need for a culture of collective responsibility whereby best practices on routing security are shared among the stakeholders.
• Kevin G. Chege from ISOC  spoke on the growing impact of the Internet of Things on the Internet.
• Jesse Sowell from M3AAWG stressed that the Transnational Anti-Abuse Working Group Development (M3AAWG) has much to offer in terms of good practice experiences in detecting and fighting abuse on the Internet.
• Yurie Ito from Cybergreen explained that Cybergreen undertakes research on a country’s Cyber Ecosystem

Block III: Planning for a more trusted Internet|
Following the introduction about open internet standards that can improve justified trust in use of the Internet and email (Block I), and the examples of good practice provided (Block II), this brainstorm session focused on answering the question: 

What to do, together, to improve justified trust in using the Internet and email in the region?

Using the Open Access method for organizing this slot, three main topics were selected and consequently discussed amongst delegates:

1. MANRS (proposed by Michuki Mwangi)
2. IoT (proposed by Kevin Chege)
3. M3AAWG (proposed by Jesse Sowell)

For more detailed information on the sessions and the outcomes, please read the GFCE Triple-I Report.
 

Conclusions & Closing Remarks
Many of the good practices presented on subjects like IoT security, MANRS, M3AAWG, Cybergreen, CERT activities and the NIBP approach to fight DDoS attacks were “new” for at least a good part of the over 50 participants from the region that participated during the day. During this day delegates learned how much global resources are already there to help in taking local action, and expressed the intent to further local implementation of global good practices.