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Hedge 213: Batfish with Ratul Mahajan

Network configuration analysis has always been the domain of commercial-grade software. Batfish changes all that with an open source, community-supported tool that can find errors and guarantees the correctness of planned or current network configurations. Ratul Mahajan joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to talk about this new tool, its capabilities, and the importance of network configuration analysis.
 

 
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You can find out more about Batfish at the project home page, and in this paper by Ratul.

Weekend Reads 020924


Artificial intelligence and the chips that fuel its evolution have given rise to a new arms race between the US and China.


Alongside concerning recent security news, there has been a media-wide rise of references to ‘credential stuffing’. This is a term that doesn’t convey very much, but as it’s the accepted term inside the infosec community, it’s probably here to stay.


In October, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed a set of rules that if implemented would transform how financial institutions handle personal data about their customers.


In a far cry from the early 2000s, most U.S. adults today say they use the internet (95%), have a smartphone (90%) or subscribe to high-speed internet at home (80%), according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted May 19 to Sept. 5, 2023.


Cloudflare was a victim of the wide-ranging Okta supply-chain campaign last fall, with a data breach impacting its Atlassian Bitbucket, Confluence, and Jira platforms beginning on Thanksgiving Day.


Honeypots are usually used as an intrusion detection tool. Many security researchers, including Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTS), deploy honeypots, to learn about tools, tactics, and the attacker’s infrastructure.


AWS could rake in between $400 million and Continue reading

Hedge 212: Shift Left? w/Chris Romeo

How many times have you heard you should “shift left” in the last few years? What does “shift left” even mean? Even if it had meaning once, does it still have any meaning today? Should we abandon the concept, or just the term? Listen in as Chris Romeo joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to talk about the origin, meaning, and modern uselessness of the term “shift left.”
 

 
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On Writing Complexity

I’ve been on a bit of a writer’s break after finishing the CCST book, but it’s time to rekindle my “thousand words a day” habit. As always, one part of this is thinking about how I write—is there anything I need to change? Tools, perhaps, or style?

What about the grade level complexity of my writing? I’ve never really paid attention to this, but I’m working on contributing to a site regularly that does. So maybe I should.

I tend to write to the tenth or eleventh-grade level, even when writing “popular material,” like blog posts. The recommended level is around the eighth-grade level. Is this something I need to change?

It seems the average person considers anything above the eighth-grade reading level “too hard” to read, so they give up. Every reading level calculation I’ve looked at essentially uses word and sentence length as proxies for complexity. Long words and sentences intimidate people.

On the other hand, measuring the reading grade level can seem futile. There are plenty of complex concepts described by one- and two-syllable words. Short sentences can still have lots of meaning.

Further, the reading grade level does not tell you if the sentence makes sense. Continue reading

Weekend Reads 020224


Everybody likes good news, especially at the beginning of the corporate year, and we are happy to report that TSMC’s revenues in the fourth quarter ended in December 2023 were only down 1.5 percent year on year to $19.62 billion, and were up 13.6 sequentially from the third quarter


HP CEO Enrique Lores admitted this week that the company’s long-term objective is “to make printing a subscription” when he was questioned about the company’s approach to third-party replacement ink suppliers.


The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has proposed creating a new top-level domain (TLD) and never allowing it to be delegated in the global domain name system (DNS) root.


What is cool about DNS over HTTPS is that, well, it uses HTTPS. Because HTTP clients are plentiful and well understood by many developers, it should make for a pretty simple implementation.


However, VPN is no longer good enough to secure remote work. For instance, VPN gives remote employees full network access to corporate resources when they login.


Universally, every person that I put the question to dismissed FWA wireless as a temporary technology with no real long-term legs.


Apple launched the original 128 kB Continue reading

Hedge 211: Learning About Learning

How much have you thought about the way you learn–or how to effectively teach beginners? There is a surprising amount of research into how humans learn, and how best to create material to teach them. In this roundtable episode, Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ discuss a recent paper from the Communications of the ACM, 10 Things Software Developers Should Learn about Learning.

 

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Weekend Reads 012624


A study by Consumer Reports and non-profit The Markup concluded that for the average lone Facebook user, 2,230 companies, and in some cases more than 7,000, will hand over that person’s information to Facebook.


2023’s copious chatter about generative AI has not translated into surging semiconductor revenues across the industry, according to analyst firm Gartner.


According to a report by industry analyst Trendforce, the tech company will up the base memory requirement on Windows 12 to 16GB in accordance with its standard for running its AI assistant Copilot at minimum efficiency.


Imagine downloading an open weights AI language model, and all seems good at first, but it later turns malicious.


The supermassive leak contains data from numerous previous breaches, comprising an astounding 12 terabytes of information, spanning over a mind-boggling 26 billion records.


In order for CPU and AI Accelerators/GPUs to effectively work with each other for larger training models, the communication bandwidth of the PCIe-based interconnects between them needs to scale to keep up with the exponentially increasing size of parameters and data sets used in AI models.


It was one thing to support cell towers when they were used for rural cellphone coverage. But it’s a new equation Continue reading

Hedge 210: Eric Chou and Technical Publishing

Have you ever thought about publishing a book or recording a professional video? It’s not as simple as proposing an idea, doing the work, and becoming famous (or infamous, as the case might be). Eric Chou joins Rick Graziani and Russ to talk about the ins and outs of technical publishing. We are planning a part 2 of this in a few months to cover things we left on the table for later discussion.

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Weekend Reads 011924


Pressure to resolve incidents quickly that often comes from peers, leadership, and members of affected teams only adds to the chaos of incident management, causing more human errors. Coordinating incidents such as this through the process of having an Incident Commander role has shown more controllable outcomes for organizations around the world.


The Kimsuky Group, believed to be a North Korea-based advanced persistent threat (APT) group active since 2013, struck again several times this year.


QUIC supports connection migration, allowing the client to migrate an established QUIC connection from one path to the other. QUIC’s path validation mechanism can be used to attack the peer and make it consume an unbounded amount of memory.


The NVM Express consortium has updated its specifications by adding a Computational Storage Feature, creating a standardized way for applications to talk to storage devices that include some processing capability.


Post Office chief exec Nick Read left British politicians shocked with his evidence before a Parliamentary committee yesterday after he admitted he could not say when the public body at the center of the historic miscarriage of justice knew when its system was at fault.


We’re only a few weeks into 2024, and violations of people’s Continue reading

Making Networking Cool Again? (2)

Network engineering is not “going away.” Network engineering is not less important than it was yesterday, last year, or even a decade ago.

But there still seems to be a gap somewhere. There are fewer folks interested than we need. We need more folks who want to work as full-time network engineers, and more folks with network engineering skills diffused within the larger IT community. More of both is the right answer if we’re going to continue building large-scale systems that work. The real lack of enthusiasm for learning network engineering is hurting all of IT, not just network engineering.

How do we bridge this gap? We’re engineers. We solve problems. This seems to be a problem we might be able to solve (unlike human nature). Let’s try to solve it.

As you might have guessed, I have some ideas. These are not the only ideas in the world—feel free to think up more!

If you walk into a robotics class, even an introductory robotics class, you see people … building robots. If you walk into a coding class, even an introductory one, you see people … writing software. If you walk into a network network engineering class you Continue reading

Weekend Reads 011224

Yes, the weekend has pretty much already passed, but still …


The WailingCrab malware has gained notoriety for its stealth. IBM X-Force security researchers recently published an in-depth analysis of the malware, which has been abusing Internet of Things (IoT) messaging protocol MQTT.


SpaceX successfully launched 21 satellites, including the first six Starlink satellites equipped with “Direct to Cell” capabilities.


MTL mode is a technique developed by Verisign researchers that can reduce the operational impact of a signature scheme when authenticating an evolving series of messages.


While Kubernetes adoption continues to soar, it has become a prime target for cyberattacks. Unfortunately, Kubernetes clusters are complex and can be difficult to secure. Safeguarding your Kubernetes environment requires a solid understanding of the common attack chains that pose a threat to your infrastructure.


Going into 2023, the big telcos had publicly announced plans to build 9.4 million fiber passings, but during the year, they collectively pared that back expectations to 6.5 million passings.


A new exploitation technique called Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) smuggling can be weaponized by threat actors to send spoofed emails with fake sender addresses while bypassing security measures.


The Atomic Stealer, also known as “AMOS,” first Continue reading

Making Networking Cool Again? (1)

Is network engineering still cool?

It certainly doesn’t seem like it, does it? College admissions seem to be down in the network engineering programs I know of, and networking certifications seem to be down, too. Maybe we’ve just passed the top of the curve, and computer networking skills are just going the way of coopering. Let’s see if we can sort out the nature of this malaise and possible solutions. Fair warning—this is going to take more than one post.

Let’s start here: It could be that computer networking is a solved problem, and we just don’t need network engineers any longer.

I’ve certainly heard people say these kinds of things—for instance, one rather well-known network engineer said, just a few years back, that network engineers would no longer be needed in five years. According to this view, the entire network should be like a car. You get in, turn the key, and it “just works.” There shouldn’t be any excitement or concern about a commodity like transporting packets. Another illustration I’ve heard used is “network bandwidth should just be like computer memory—if you need more, add it.”

Does this really hold, though? Even if we accept the Continue reading

Weekend Reads 011524

Thanks to Mark Prosser for a few links to add to the pile this week.


There’s a rumor flying around the Internet that OpenAI is training foundation models on your Dropbox documents.


Microsoft found that a popular form of video-based training reduces phish-clicking behavior by about 3%, at best. This number has been stable over the years, says Microsoft, while phishing attacks are increasing yearly.


The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has warned that policy proposals requiring or enabling the automated scouring of people’s devices for illegal material – as floated by the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States – threaten the open internet.


Another update of the Ultimate PCAP is available. Again, there are some special new packets in there which I want to point out here. Feel free to download the newest version to examine those new protocols and packets by yourself. Featuring: SNMPv3, WoL, IPMI, HSRP, Zabbix, Pile of Poo, and Packet Comments.


The Genesis Market began operating in 2017, four years after Silk Road closed shop. Like its predecessor, though, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other law enforcement agencies took the Genesis Market down last April.


Miyake events are believed to be Continue reading

Modern Network Troubleshooting

I’ve reformatted and rebuilt my network troubleshooting live training for 2023, and am teaching it on the 26th of January (in three weeks). You can register at Safari Books Online. From the site:

The first way to troubleshoot faster is to not troubleshoot at all, or to build resilient networks. The first section of this class considers the nature of resilience, and how design tradeoffs result in different levels of resilience. The class then moves into a theoretical understanding of failures, how network resilience is measured, and how the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) relates to human and machine-driven factors. One of these factors is the unintended consequences arising from abstractions, covered in the next section of the class.

The class then moves into troubleshooting proper, examining the half-split formal troubleshooting method and how it can be combined with more intuitive methods. This section also examines how network models can be used to guide the troubleshooting process. The class then covers two examples of troubleshooting reachability problems in a small network, and considers using ChaptGPT and other LLMs in the troubleshooting process. A third, more complex example is then covered in a data center fabric.

A short section on proving Continue reading

The RFC Process

I’ve just finished a seven-part series over at Packets Pushers about the process of writing and publishing an RFC. Even if you don’t ever plan to write a draft or participate in the IETF, this series will give you a better idea of the work that goes into creating new standards and IETF documents.

So … you have an idea you think would fit perfectly into the realm of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)—but where do you start?

This, the second, post, will consider document formatting and two of the (sometimes) more difficult sections of an IETF draft to fill in.

There are other seemingly mystical concepts in the IETF process as well—for instance, what is a “document stream,” and what is a document’s “status?”

You’re almost ready to submit a shiny new document to the IETF for consideration, right? Not quite yet—we still need to deal with mandatory sections and language.

You cannot simply post a draft to the IETF repository and expect “someone, somewhere,” to take action.

The working group chairs asked if your draft should become a working group item, and the consensus was to accept! It might seem like your draft is home free Continue reading

Hedge 206: Taking Care of Yourself with Ethan Banks

As we reach the end of what has been a hard two-year stretch for what seems like the entire world, Ethan Banks joins Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ to talk about the importance of taking care of yourself. In the midst of radical changes, you can apply self-discipline to make your little part of the world a better place by keeping yourself sane, fit, and well-rested.

 

 

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Thoughts on 2023

As we close out 2023, some random observations about engineering, culture, and life.

Network engineering needs help. I am hearing, from all over the place, that network engineering is “not cool.” There is a dearth of students entering the pipeline. College programs are struggling, and many organizations are struggling with a lack of engineering talent—in fact, I would guess the most common reason for companies to move to “the cloud” is because they cannot find anyone who knows how to build an operate a network any longer.

It probably didn’t help that for the last few years many “thought leaders” in the network engineering space have been saying there is no future in network engineering. It also doesn’t help that network engineering training has become stilted and … boring. Coders are off talking about how to solve problems. Robotics folks are working on cool projects that solve problems.

Network engineers are being taught how to spend less money and told to “find another career.”

I don’t know how we think we can sustain a healthy world of IT without network engineers.

And yes, I know there are folks who think networking problems are simple, easy enough to solve Continue reading

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