Worth Reading: The danger of macros

Back in 2012, faced with the need to write the identical thing—language regarding FISA minimization procedures—many, many times, NSA tried to develop some efficiency by automating a portion of their Word templates. This worked fine, until for whatever reason, NSA Hawaii redesigned its network to block external access from other parts of the NSA. -Lawfare

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Worth Reading: Leaky end users

Insider threat once again tops the list of enterprise cyber security threats in the 2016 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). For the second straight year, Verizon research showed that the average enterprise is less likely to have its data stolen than to have an end user give away sensitive credentials and data—whether unintentionally or maliciously. -Cloud Security Alliance

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People Skills

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Worth Reading: Leaving fixed function switches behind

There are two competing trends in platform designs that architects always have to contend with. They can build a platform that performs a specific function and does it well, or create a more generic platform that sacrifices some efficiency but does a lot of jobs well. Sometimes you try to shoot the gap between these two poles. -The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: The end of the hypervisor

The death knell of the hypervisor was sounded when Intel provided much of the unique capabilities of the hypervisor directly in the chip via the Intel-VTx instruction set. Prior to this, VMware and Xen had two unique approaches to providing hypervisor capabilities: binary translation and paravirtualization respectively. Arguments raged about which was faster, but once Intel-VTx came along, by virtue of being on the chip die, it was the de facto speed winner. -Cloud Scaling

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No Capes, No Wands

As a keen observer of the network engineering world for the last twenty… okay, maybe longer, but I don’t want to sound like an old man telling stories quite yet… years, there’s one thing I’ve always found kind-of strange. We have a strong tendency towards hero worship.

I don’t really know why this might be, but I’ve seen it in Cisco TAC—the almost hushed tones around a senior engineer who “is brilliant.” I’ve seen it while sitting in a meeting in the middle of an argument over some technical point in a particular RFC. Someone says, “we should just ask the author…” Which is almost always followed by something like: “Really? You know them?”

To some degree, this is understandable—network engineering is difficult, and we should truly honor those in our world who have made a huge impact. In many other ways, it’s unhelpful, and even unhealthy. Why?

First, it tends to create an “us versus them,” atmosphere in our world. There are engineers who work on “normal” networks, and then there are those who work on, well, you know, special ones. Not everyone needs those “special skills,” so we end up creating a vast pool of people Continue reading

Worth Reading: Policymakers are from Mars

This week, Herb Lin and I are giving a joint talk about the suit-hoodie divide, and whether relations between Washington and Silicon Valley are getting worse (I think the answer is yes). Part of the problem stems from conflicting interests and serious differences of opinion about policy. But a large part of the problem—and perhaps the hardest and most hidden part—stems from cultural differences. -Lawfare

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Worth Reading: Big thinkers leave Cisco

The industry is reeling from Monday’s report that four of Cisco’s best-known executives are leaving the company. An internal memo from Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, announced the resignations of Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero and Soni Jiandani, effective June 17. The four formed a team that many referred to as MPLS — letters that represent the initials of their first names. -Channel Partners

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When prepend fails, what next? (3)

We began this short series with a simple problem—what do you do if your inbound traffic across two Internet facing links is imbalanced? In other words, how do you do BGP load balancing? The first post looked at problems with AS Path prepend, while the second looked at de-aggregating and using communities to modify the local preference within the upstream provider’s network.

There is one specific solution I want to discuss a bit more before I end this little series: de-aggregation. Advertising longer prefixes is the “big hammer” of routing; you should always be careful when advertising more specifics. The Default Free Zone (DFZ) is much like the “commons” of an old village. No-one actually “owns” the routing table in the global Internet, but everyone benefits from it. De-aggregating don’t really cost you anything, but it does cost everyone else something. It’s easy enough to inject another route into the routing table, but remember the longer prefix you inject shows up everywhere in the world. You’re fixing your problem by taking up some small amount of memory in every router that’s connected to the DFZ in the world. If everyone de-aggregates, everyone has to buy larger routers and more Continue reading

Worth Reading: GeekPwn Hacking Contest

Geeks showed their power at the GeekPwn Macau and succeeded in finding vulnerabilities in dozens of mainstream routers, remote controls, smart cameras, hacker-proof safes and other smart devices including TCP protocol stack vulnerabilities leading to remote hijacking. -Mitnick Security

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Worth Reading: Radicalizing data collection

Like many Silicon Valley start-ups, Larry Gadea’s company collects heaps of sensitive data from his customers. Recently, he decided to do something with that data trove that was long considered unthinkable: He is getting rid of it. The reason? Gadea fears that one day the FBI might do to him what it did to Apple in their recent legal battle: demand that he give the agency access to his encrypted data. Rather than make what he considers a Faustian bargain, he’s building a system that he hopes will avoid the situation entirely. Washington Post

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The License Agreement

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Worth Reading: Journey to the CCDE

On May the 17th I passed the CCDE practical in Madrid and became Swedens 2nd CCDE, CCDE #20160011. This post describes my journey to passing the CCDE practical in my 1st attempt and the materials that I used to do so. Lost in Transit

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Worth Reading: The age of the GPU

Having made the improbable jump from the game console to the supercomputer, GPUs are now invading the datacenter. This movement is led by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Tesla, Baidu and others who have quietly but rapidly shifted their hardware philosophy over the past twelve months. Each of these companies have significantly upgraded their investment in GPU hardware and in doing so have put legacy CPU infrastructure on notice. The Next Platform

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Reading List: 060916

A few of the papers, RFCs, and drafts I’m reading this week, along with a short description of each.

A Survey of Worldwide Censorship Techniques
draft-hall-censorship-tech-03

Censorship is a large problem on the Internet—but it’s often difficult to find any good description of the various ways censors can both find and block “offending” content. This draft is a short, readable overview of the various techniques actually seen in the wild, along with pointers to research about the techniques themselves, and instances where they’ve been used in the real world.

IPv6 Extension Headers and Packet Drops
draft-gont-v6ops-ipv6-ehs-in-real-world

One of the interesting features of IPv6 is its support for extension headers, which are variable length bits of information—metadata about the packet, for instance—that can be attached to a packet and processed by either the receiving host or forwarding devices along the way. Extension headers are useful, in that they allow IPv6 to be easily extended on the fly, rather than forcing the protocol designer to create a set of metadata “in stone.” Extension headers, however, are also controversial; how should an ASIC designer decide which ones to support in hardware, and how should extension headers that cannot be handled in hardware Continue reading

Worth Reading: Big data and big trouble

Deluged with an unprecedented amount of information available for analysis, companies in just about every industry are discovering increasingly sophisticated ways to make market observations, predictions and evaluations. Big Data can help companies make decisions ranging from which candidates to hire to which consumers should receive a special promotional offer. As a powerful tool for social good, Big Data can bring new opportunities for advancement to underserved populations, increase productivity and make markets more efficient. MarketWatch

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Worth Reading: How to fight latency

Given that minimizing latency, and by association, determining a path across the global Internet with minimal packet loss is still critical, how can we accomplish this? Using the $20 billion real-time ad serving market as an example, we’ll first look at the different components, and then introduce an approach to mitigate latency. New Stack

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Worth Reading: Windows WPAD attack

Windows’ WPAD feature has for many years provided attackers and penetration testers a simple way to perform MITM attacks on web traffic. There is, for example, a great blog post by Tod Beardsley called “MS09-008: Web Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD), Illustrated” that highlights the problems with WPAD. Now finally, roughly 10 years after WPAD was introduced, the penetration testing framework Metasploit includes support for WPAD via a new auxiliary module located at “auxiliary/server/wpad”. This module, which is written by Efrain Torres, can be used to perform for man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks by exploiting the features of WPAD. Netresec

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Worth Reading: IPv6 Link Local Addresses

In November 2014, after quite some controversy in the IETF OPSEC working group (for those interested look at the archives), the Informational RFC 7404 “Using Only Link-Local Addressing inside an IPv6 Network” was published. It is authored by Michael Behringer and Eric Vyncke and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of an approach using “only link-local addresses on infrastructure links between routers”. APNIC

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Building a “Network” Network

Over my years as a network engineer, I’ve notice that the engineering job tends to be somewhat isolated (or isolating). Part of the reason is probably that there tend to be one or two network engineers at a single company, munged in with a lot of other IT folks who share some common ground (but not entirely), so there’s little chance to interact with others who are working on the same sorts of problem sets on a day to day basis. This tends to produce network engineers who are more attached to their vendor than they are to their “day job.” In fact, this tends to make the entire network engineering world, to the average network engineer, appear to be “not much more” than the vendors who show up on our doorsteps, the vendor specific trade shows we can attend, and what we read online. This is—how can I say this gently—??

This is an unhealthy situation for your career as a network engineer—and as a person.

What you need to do is build a network of other network engineers—a network network—so you can broaden your scope, keep your ear to the ground for changes, prepare for changes, have Continue reading