Into the Gray Zone: Considering Active Defense

Most engineers focus on purely technical mechanisms for defending against various kinds of cyber attacks, including “the old magic bullet,” the firewall. The game of cannons and walls is over, however, and the cannons have won; those who depend on walls are in for a shocking future. What is the proper response, then? What defenses are there The reality is that just like in physical warfare, the defenses will take some time to develop and articulate.

One very promising line of thinking is that of active defense. While the concept is often attributed to some recent action, active defense has been one form of warfare for many centuries; there are instances of what might be called active defense outlined in the Bible and in Greek histories. But it is only recently, in light of the many wars around Israel, that defense in depth has taken on its modern shape in active defense. What about active defense is so interesting from a network security perspective? It is primarily this: in active defense, the defender seeks to tire an attacker out by remaining mobile, misdirecting the attacker, and using every opportunity to learn about the attacker’s techniques, aims, and resources to reflect Continue reading

Worth Reading: Commercial incentives behind IPv6 deployment

The Best Practice Forum (BPF) on IPv6 at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) explored what economic and commercial incentives drive providers, companies and organizations to deploy IPv6 on their networks and for their services. The BPF collected case studies, held open discussions online and at the 2016 IGF meeting, and produced a comprehensive output report. This article gives a high-level overview. —CircleID

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Worth Reading: SHA-1 collision found

Cryptographic hash functions like SHA-1 are a cryptographer’s swiss army knife. You’ll find that hashes play a role in browser security, managing code repositories, or even just detecting duplicate files in storage. Hash functions compress large amounts of data into a small message digest. As a cryptographic requirement for wide-spread use, finding two messages that lead to the same digest should be computationally infeasible. Over time however, this requirement can fail due to attacks on the mathematical underpinnings of hash functions or to increases in computational power. —Google Security Blog

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The Perfect and the Good

Perfect and good: one is just an extension of the other, right?

When I was 16 (a long, long, long time ago), I was destined to be a great graphis—a designer and/or illustrator of some note. Things didn’t turn out that way, of course, but the why is a tale for another day. At any rate, in art class that year, I took an old four foot spool end, stretched canvas across it, and painted a piece in acrylic. The painting was a beach sunset, the sun’s oblong shape offsetting the round of the overall painting, with deep reds and yellows in streaks above the beach, which was dark. I painted the image as if the viewer were standing just on the break at the top of the beach, so there was a bit of sea grass scattered around to offset the darkness of the beach.

And, along one side, a rose.

I really don’t know why I included the rose; I think I just wanted to paint one for some reason, and it seemed like a good idea to combine the ideas (the sunset on the beach and the rose). I entered this large painting in a local Continue reading

Worth Reading: A fistful of bitcoins

The point forcefully made in ‘A Fistful of Bitcoins’ remains true today – Bitcoin offers little in the way of anonymity. In fact, we get better and better at techniques for de-anonymising block chain transactions over time. See for example ‘Data-driven de-anonymization in Bitcoin.’ The Mt Gox and Silk Road communities discussed in today’s paper both spectacularly disappeared though. Mt Gox ceased trading in February 2014, after losing about $350M ($473M?) worth of Bitcoin (‘Mt Gox: The History of a Failed Bitcoin Exchange‘). —The Morning Paper

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Worth Reading: Bare metal cloud

When you think of the public cloud, the tendency is to focus on the big ones, like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. They’re massive, dominating the public cloud skyline with huge datacenters filled with thousands of highly virtualized servers, not to mention virtualized storage and networking. Capacity is divvied up among corporate customers that are increasingly looking to run and store their workloads on someone else’s infrastructure, hardware that they don’t have to set up, deploy, manage or maintain themselves. —The Next Platform

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Gate

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Worth Reading: Making connections in disparate data

Enterprises are awash in data, and the number of sources of that data is only increasing. For some of the larger companies, data sources can rise into the thousands – from databases, files and tables to ERP and CRM programs – and the data itself can come in different formats, making it difficult to bring together and integrate into a unified pool. This can create a variety of challenges for businesses in everything from securing the data they have to analyzing it. —The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: Security in a box

Security in-a-box was created by a diverse team of experts who understand not only the conditions under which advocates work, but also the resource restrictions they face. Although the toolkit was designed primarily to address the growing needs of advocates in the global South – particularly human rights defenders – the software guides and security strategies in this toolkit are relevant to everyone; specifically people working with sensitive information. This may include vulnerable minorities, independent journalists or whistleblowers, as well as advocates working on a range of issues, from environmental justice to anti-corruption. —Security in a Box

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Worth Reading: AI and being left out

It is often argued that technological progress always leads to massive shifts in employment but that at the end of the day the economy grows as new jobs are created. However, that’s a far too facile way of looking at the impact of AI and automation on jobs today. Joel Mokyr, a leading economic historian at Northwestern University, has spent his career studying how people and societies have experienced the radical transitions spurred by advances in technology, such as the Industrial Revolution that began in the late 18th century. The current disruptions are faster and “more intensive,” Mokyr says. “It is nothing like what we have seen in the past, and the issue is whether the system can adapt as it did in the past.” —Technology Review

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Worth Reading: What Cisco reveals about the enterprise market

Cisco is now sitting on a staggering $71.85 billion in cash, a lot of it overseas and inaccessible for doing acquisitions or anything until it is repatriated to the United States, where it is headquartered. Cisco could borrow money to build its appliances, offsetting its cash hoard without actually drawing it down and incurring taxes, and then simply offer every switch, router, and server with a monthly rental price. It would have to wait three to four years until most of the base converts from purchases to rentals. If Cisco set the rental rate fairly, then it could get off the product sales mouse wheel completely, and if Cisco made more malleable switches, with a mix of FPGAs and maybe ASICs like Cavium’s XPliant or Barefoot Networks’ Tofino chips, it could extend the life of these rented machines quite far and not incur hardware upgrade cycle costs like it is now. —The Next Platform

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On the ‘net: Net Neutrality Explained

Net Neutrality seems like a simple, easy to understand concept—but it seems the deeper you dig into the concept, this appearance of simplicity is actually just a light coat of surfacing on a very complex set of problems. The best place to begin is with the basic premise of net neutrality: providers who are transporting data should treat every packet the same, regardless of the source, the destination, or the service. —Tech Target

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Worth Reading: Overcoming data center cabling challenges

Now, many users have started employing high-density 40GbE switch line cards to break out as part of 10GbE applications. For example, a high-density 10GbE SFP+ line card has 48x10GbE ports, whereas a high-density 40GbE QSFP+ board may have 36x40GbE ports. As such, a 40GbE line card can be used to obtain 4×36 = 144x10GbE ports in the same cabling space and power-consumption conditions, thus reducing the cost and power consumption of the single-port 10GbE. —Data Center Journal

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Worth Reading: A digital Geneva treaty

In a blog post published today on Microsoft’s website, company President and Chief Legal Officer, Brad Smith, has raised concerns over escalating cyberattcks over the past year and the need for a Digital Geneva Convention. He wrote: “Just as the Fourth Geneva Convention has long protected civilians in times of war, we now need a Digital Geneva Convention that will commit governments to protecting civilians from nation-state attacks in times of peace. —CircleID

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TCP, Congestion Control, and Buffer Bloat

Cardwell, Neal, Yuchung Cheng, C. Stephen Gunn, Soheil Hassas Yeganeh, and Van Jacobson. “BBR: Congestion-Based Congestion Control.” Queue 14, no. 5 (October 2016): 50:20–50:53. doi:10.1145/3012426.3022184.

Article available here
Slides available here

In the “old days,” packet loss was a major problems; so much so that just about every routing protocol has a number of different mechanisms to ensure the reliable delivery of packets. For instance, in IS-IS, we have—

1. Local reliability between peers using CSNPs and PSNPs
2. On some links, a periodic check using CSNPs to ensure no packets were dropped
3. Acknowledgements for packets on transmission
4. Periodic timeouts and retransmissions of LSPs

It’s not that early protocol designers were dumb, it’s that packet loss was really this much of a problem. Congestion in the more recent sense was not even something you would not have even thought of; memory was expensive, so buffers were necessarily small, and hence a packet would obviously be dropped before it was buffered for any amount of time. TCP’s retransmission mechanism, the parameters around the window size, and the slow start mechanism, were designed to react to packet drops. Further, it might be obvious to think that any particular stream might provide Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Root of the DNS

The namespace of the DNS is a hierarchically structured label space. Each label can have an arbitrary number of immediately descendant labels, and only one immediate parent label. Domain names are expressed as an ordered sequence of labels in left-to-right order starting at the terminal label and then each successive parent label until the root label is reached. When expressing a domain name the ascii period character denotes a label delimiter. Fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) are names that express a label sequence from the terminal label through to the apex (or “root”) label. —Potaroo

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Worth Reading: ARM gains a foothold in China

China represents a huge opportunity for chip designer ARM as it looks to extend its low-power system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture beyond the mobile and embedded devices spaces and into new areas, such as the datacenter and emerging markets like autonomous vehicles, drones and the Internet of Things. China is a massive, fast-growing market with tech companies – including such giants as Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent – looking to leverage such technologies as artificial intelligence to help expand their businesses deeper into the global market and turning to vendors like ARM that can help them fuel that growth. —The Next Platform

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Reaction; Do we really need a new Internet?

The other day several of us were gathered in a conference room on the 17th floor of the LinkedIn building in San Francisco, looking out of the windows as we discussed some various technical matters. All around us, there were new buildings under construction, with that tall towering crane anchored to the building in several places. We wondered how that crane was built, and considered how precise the building process seemed to be to the complete mess building a network seems to be.

And then, this week, I ran across a couple of articles arguing that we need a new Internet. For instance—

What we really have today is a Prototype Internet. It has shown us what is possible when we have a cheap and ubiquitous digital infrastructure. Everyone who uses it has had joyous moments when they have spoken to family far away, found a hot new lover, discovered their perfect house, or booked a wonderful holiday somewhere exotic. For this, we should be grateful and have no regrets. Yet we have not only learned about the possibilities, but also about the problems. The Prototype Internet is not fit for purpose for the safety-critical and socially sensitive types of Continue reading

Worth Reading: Mud Slinging

Network Engineers are redefining themselves, always learning, always trying to improve themselves and marketing still puts out things like this in 2017. Sales and marketing definitely need to up their game. As my CEO said the other day: “Business is not between companies, it’s between people”. This is exactly what it’s about. If you burn my confidence by putting up stupid stuff on social media, it will affect your sales. Endorse your product on its own merits. Don’t talk down other vendors. This only makes YOU look bad. —Lost in Transit

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Worth Reading: Putting ARM servers through the paces

When ARM officials and partners several years ago began talking about pushing the low-power chip architecture from our phones and tablets and into the datacenter, the initial target was the emerging field of microservers – small, highly dense and highly efficient systems aimed at the growing number of cloud providers and hyperscale environments where power efficiency was as important as performance. —The Next Platform

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