Worth Reading: Stacking software to support FPGA’s in the data center

Any substantial change requires a big payoff to be implemented because change is inherently risky. It doesn’t help that the method of programming FPGAs efficiently using VHDL and Verilog are so alien to Java and C programmers, and that the tools for porting code from such high level programming languages, often through an OpenCL parallel framework, down to the logic gates on an FPGA are not as efficient as doing the VHDL and Verilog by hand, from scratch, but these tools are getting better. And finally, the application development and runtime stacks common in the enterprise do not know what to do with FPGAs. —The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: FPGA Accelerated Cloud

FPGAs have been an emerging topic on the application acceleration front over the last couple of years, but despite increased attention around use cases in machine learning and other hot areas, hands have been tied due to simply on-boarding with both the hardware and software. —The Next Platform

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Sunset Over Salt Marsh

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Worth Reading: Car Makers Align with 5G

5G wireless technology has become a little like fully automated cars. Nearly every day some new study is forecasting an earlier than previously anticipated arrival of fully autonomous cars, while some respected expert is claiming full automation is decades away. With 19 automated fleets already plying controlled-use areas, I am inclined to buy the early onset assessment of automation vs. the over-the-horizon outlook from skeptics. —ITU Blog

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Worth Reading: Binge Watching Makes You Stupid

Binge is the new black. That’s what Netflix, and other media outlets tell us as they rev up for the holiday season. Are your in-laws too much? Kids driving you nuts? Had enough holiday cooking, cleaning, and entertaining? Well, take a break from real life and the stresses of the holidays and focus on something less confrontational: television. —Acculturated

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Worth Reading: Hyper Moore’s Law

Over the last year in particular, we have documented the merger between high performance computing and deep learning and its various shared hardware and software ties. This next year promises far more on both horizons and while GPU maker Nvidia might not have seen it coming to this extent when it was outfitting its first GPUs on the former top “Titan” supercomputer, the company sensed a mesh on the horizon when the first hyperscale deep learning shops were deploying CUDA and GPUs to train neural networks. —The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: Marai Strikes Again

More than 900,000 customers of German ISP Deutsche Telekom (DT) were knocked offline this week after their Internet routers got infected by a new variant of a computer worm known as Mirai. The malware wriggled inside the routers via a newly discovered vulnerability in a feature that allows ISPs to remotely upgrade the firmware on the devices. But the new Mirai malware turns that feature off once it infests a device, complicating DT’s cleanup and restoration efforts. —Krebs on Security

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Worth Reading: Social Media is Entertainment

Like TV it now increasingly entertains us, and even more so than television it amplifies our existing beliefs and habits. It makes us feel more than think, and it comforts more than challenges. The result is a deeply fragmented society, driven by emotions, and radicalized by lack of contact and challenge from outside. This is why Oxford Dictionaries designated “post-truth” as the word of 2016: an adjective “relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals.” —MIT Technology Review

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Worth Reading: SF Subway Hacked

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) was hit with a ransomware attack on Friday, causing fare station terminals to carry the message, “You are Hacked. ALL Data Encrypted.” Turns out, the miscreant behind this extortion attempt got hacked himself this past weekend, revealing details about other victims as well as tantalizing clues about his identity and location. —Krebs on Security

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Reaction: Openflow and Software Based Switching

Over at the Networking Nerd, Tom has an interesting post up about openflow—this pair of sentences, in particular, caught my eye—

The side effect of OpenFlow is that it proved that networking could be done in software just as easily as it could be done in hardware. Things that we thought we historically needed ASICs and FPGAs to do could be done by a software construct.

I don’t think this is quite right, actually… When I first started working in network engineering (wheels were square then, and dirt hadn’t yet been invented—but we did have solar flares that caused bit flips in memory), we had all software based switching. The Cisco 7200, I think, was the ultimate software based switching box, although the little 2ru 4500 (get your head out of the modern router line, think really old stuff here!) had a really fast processor, and hence could process packets really quickly. These were our two favorite lab boxes, in fact. But in the early 1990’s, the SSE was introduced, soldered on to an SSP blade that slid into a 7500 chassis.

The rest, as they say, is history. The networking world went to chips designed to switch Continue reading

Worth Reading: Kraken

How do you know how well your systems can perform under stress? How can you identify resource utilization bottlenecks? And how do you know your tests match the condititions experienced with live production traffic? You could try load modeling (simulation), but it’s not really feasible to model systems undergoing constantly evolving workloads, frequent software release cycles, and complex dependencies. —the morning paper

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Worth Reading: The Dangers of the New UK Investigatory Powers Act

There is an old adage that trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair. When it comes to the Internet and its users, the same holds true. For average Internet users, trust in the Internet has to be built. They have to gain confidence in the safety of their private information online. When a user’s private online information is made public, they lose trust in the Internet and its services. —The Internet Society

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Traffic Pattern Attacks: A Real Threat

Assume, for a moment, that you have a configuration something like this—

Some host, A, is sending queries to, and receiving responses from, a database at C. An observer, B, has access to the packets on the wire, but neither the host nor the server. All the information between the host and the server is encrypted. There is nothing the observer, B, can learn about the information being carried between the client and the server? Given the traffic is encrypted, you might think… “not very much.”

A recent research paper published at CCS ’16 in Vienna argues the observer could know a lot more. In fact, based on just the patterns of traffic between the server and the client, given the database uses atomic operations and encrypts each record separately, it’s possible to infer the key used to query the database (not the cryptographic key). The paper can be found here. Specifically:

We then develop generic reconstruction attacks on any system supporting range queries where either access pattern or communication volume is leaked. These attacks are in a rather weak passive adversarial model, where the untrusted server knows only the underlying query distribution. In particular, to perform our attack Continue reading

Worth Reading: Navigating the Pentest World

The demand for penetration testing and security assessment services worldwide has been growing year-on-year. Driven largely by Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) concerns, plus an evolving pressure to be observed taking information security and customer privacy seriously, most CIO/CSO/CISO’s can expect to conduct regular “pentests” as a means of validating their organizations or product’s security —CircleID

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Butterfly

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Worth Reading: Akamai on the Krebs DDoS

Internet infrastructure giant Akamai last week released a special State of the Internet report. Normally, the quarterly accounting of noteworthy changes in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks doesn’t delve into attacks on specific customers. But this latest Akamai report makes an exception in describing in great detail the record-sized attack against KrebsOnSecurity.com in September, the largest such assault it has ever mitigated. —Krebs on Security

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Worth Reading: 4G and 5G Mobile Backhaul

The aim of LTE was to make anytime, anywhere services a reality. To achieve this, LTE increased capacity, improved coverage and provided high-speed mobile data. Demand for data has since increased beyond all expectations and today there is a tidal wave of traffic on mobile networks. This growth has been driven by the availability of rich multimedia content and consumers using their mobile devices to run multiple, always up services including streaming video, internet applications and connection to sensors in their homes and cars. This growth shows no sign of slowing down and the industry consensus forecasts that traffic on mobile networks is going to continue growing dramatically for the rest of this decade. —ECI

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On the ‘Net: Engineer Versus Complexity

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Worth Reading: How do I start an IXP?

The hard part with establishing an IXP is not really the technical part, but building a community and trust. Also, an IXP needs to be sustainable beyond the establishment phase. This includes having enough funds to operate and to upgrade equipment in the future as technology develops and traffic grows. Most IXPs ensure this by setting up a mutual or membership association so that the users of the IXP have equal say in the operation of the IXP. This is by far the most successful model of IXPs today. —APNIC

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Worth Reading: When will SD-WAN be Adopted?

The survey respondents were given a wide range of options and asked to indicate which options described their company’s approach to implementing an SD-WAN. Their responses, which are shown in Figure 1, show that there is broad interest in SD-WANs. For example, only a quarter of the respondents (26%) work for companies that have not yet made any analysis of SD-WANs and only a tenth of the respondents work for companies that have looked at SD-WANs but decided to not take any additional steps over the next year. However, that broad interest has not yet translated into broad adoption as only 5% of the survey respondents indicated that they currently have SD-WAN functionality running in their production networks. —ECI

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