Worth Reading: Lego Robots versus Gesture Security

A DARPA-funded report titled “Robotic Robbery on the Touch Screen” published recently in the journal ACM Transactions on Information and System Security looks at gestural authentication through the eyes of a more sophisticated hacker. It presents two Lego-driven robotic attacks on a touch-based authentication system—one is based on gestural statistics collected over time from a large population of users and the other is based on stealing gestural data directly from a user. Both were pretty effective. -via Motherboard

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Thinking about side channel attacks

When Cyrus wanted to capture Babylon, he attacked the river that flows through the city, drying it out and then sending his army under the walls through the river entrance and exit points. In a similar way, the ventilator is a movie favorite, used in both Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, probably along with a thousand other movies and stories throughout time. What do rivers and ventilators have to do with network security?

Side channel attacks. Now I don’t know if the attacks described in these papers, or Cyrus’ attack through the Euphrates, are considered side channel, or just lateral, but either way: the most vulnerable point in your network is just where you assume you can’t be attacked, or that point where you haven’t thought through security. Two things I read this week reminded me of the importance of system level thinking when it comes to security.

The first explores the Network Time Protocol (NTP), beginning with the general security of the protocol. Security in a time protocol is particularly difficult, as the entire point of encryption is to use algorithms that take a lot of time for an attacker to calculate—and there’s probably some relationship between Continue reading

Worth Reading: Docker Launches Vulnerability Scanner

The Docker Cloud hosted container service now offers the ability to scan containers for known security vulnerabilities. The technology behind the security service, called Docker Security Scanning, will also be a core component of the Docker Datacenter, Docker’s software for running a container management service in house. -via The New Stack

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Worth Reading: Six Tips for Securing BGP

There are different initiatives working on the problem of authenticating incoming BGP routes. The key technology is to use certificates, but doing so leads to a lot of implications, such as more route churn, larger BGP tables, and the need to learn how to exchange certificates and handle unsigned routes. Considering the difficulties we have today to get ISPs to implement even basic protection mechanisms, I don’t expect authentication of BGP routes to reach widespread usage for a long time. So what are some of the things we can do today to improve BGP security? Here are six tips. -via Network Computing

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Why you need to learn to code

We’ve all heard it by now: you’d better learn to code, or your network engineering career is going to die a quick (and potentially painful) death. Maybe you could still act as a briefcase carrier, and call yourself a consultant, but without coding skills, you’re open ended job is going to become a dead end, and you’ll be a has been. While just about everyone has weighed in on this topic recently, I don’t know if anyone has, IMHO, really dug down to the bottom of the question. Permit me to give it a try (and feel free to disagree in the comments).

To get to the point, allow me to summarize both sides of the argument (hopefully without building and straw men along the way). On one side are folks who say that the Command Line Interface (CLI) is dead, and that we must learn to automate everything. Part of the argument here seems to be that without automation, we won’t be able to keep the operational costs (OPEX) down; as networks are primarily a cost center (rather than a strategic asset), driving costs down is one of the most important tasks a network engineer can take on. That, Continue reading

Worth Reading: Social Media and Monetization

Social media developed by entrepreneurs, backed by venture capital, will eventually have to find some revenue. And there are only three choices: they sell information about their users and content creators, even if that’s just access to the attention of the users via advertisements; they sell services to their users and content creators; they sell the content their creators gave to them, or at least take a huge cut of any such sales. That’s it. -via Easily Distracted

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Worth Reading: Consumer Watchdog Took Millions From Google

An influential tech industry watchdog group that has received millions of dollars from Google has been silent on the internet giant’s recent fight to circumvent Federal Communications Commission restrictions on data collection. The Center for Democracy and Technology, a consumer watchdog group with outsized influence in Washington, took in $2.5 million from Google between 2010 and 2014, according to tax records. The donations amounted to more than double the amount contributed by any other company during the same period. -via Free Beacon

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Securing BGP: A Case Study

What would it take to secure BGP? Let’s begin where any engineering problem should begin: what problem are we trying to solve? This series of posts walks through a wide range of technical and business problems to create a solid set of requirements against which to measure proposed solutions for securing BGP in the global Internet, and then works through several proposed solutions to see how they stack up.

Post 1: An introduction to the problem space
Post 2: What can I prove in a routing system?
Post 3: What I can prove in a routing system?
Post 4: Centralized or decentralized?
Post 5: Centralized or decentralized?
Post 6: Business issues with centralization
Post 7: Technical issues with centralization
Post 8: A full requirements list
Post 9: BGPSEC (S-BGP) compared to the requirements
Post 10: RPKI compared to the requirements

I will continue updating this post as I work through the remaining segments of this series.

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Worth Reading: Breaches at eMail Providers

Hundreds of millions of hacked user names and passwords for email accounts and other websites are being traded in Russia’s criminal underworld, a security expert told Reuters. The discovery of 272.3 million stolen accounts included a majority of users of Mail.ru (MAILRq.L), Russia’s most popular email service, and smaller fractions of Google (GOOGL.O), Yahoo (YHOO.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O) email users, said Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security. -via Reuters

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Worth Reading: Feinstein-Burr, Encryption, and “The Rule of Law”

There’s a lot to say about the substance of the misguided anti-encryption legislation sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr, which was recently released as a “discussion draft” after a nearly-identical version leaked earlier this month. I hope to do just that in subsequent posts. But it’s also worth spending a little time on the proposal’s lengthy preamble, which echoes the rhetorical tropes frequently deployed by advocates for mandating government access to secure communications and stored data. -via Just Security

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Buenos Aires Garden

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Worth Reading: SD-WAN Consolidation?

In normal conditions, having as many as 20 companies chasing the same dollars would be unsustainable, so I’ve been waiting for consolidation—that is, for the market to coalesce around a handful (three? four? five?) companies that will emerge as winners after Hunger Games-like forces of capitalism eliminate the other tributes. -via Packet Pushers

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Worth Reading: Yes, you should always update your software

We have all received those annoying interruptions to our work — yes, the dreaded “update your software” message. Updates can be cumbersome — they can force you to stop what you’re doing, restart your computer, or change the interface you were working in upon the restart. But as unfun as they might be, they are an essential part of strong digital hygiene and one of the most important steps you can take to protect and secure your personal devices. -via CDT

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Slideshare: Engineer versus Complexity

These are the slides from my Interop presentation this last week.

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Worth Reading: It’s worth learning to troubleshoot

Since I have been working in IT for many years there are a few traits that generally separate a good engineer from a great engineer. One of those traits is troubleshooting. For those of you out there who have been doing this a long time would hopefully agree. -via Packet Pushers

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Worth Reading: Increasing the Strength of the Zone Signing Key for the Root Zone

A major milestone was achieved in mid-2010 when Verisign and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Commerce, successfully deployed DNSSEC for the root zone. Following that point in time, it became possible for DNS resolvers and applications to validate signed DNS records using a single root zone trust anchor. -via CircleID

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DR versus DIS: What’s the Diff?

OSPF and IS-IS, both link state protocols, use mechanisms that manage flooding on a broadcast link, as well as simplify the shortest path tree passing through the broadcast link. OSPF elects a Designated Router (or DR) to simplify broadcast links, and IS-IS elects a Designated Intermediate System (or DIS—a topic covered in depth in the IS-IS Livelesson I recently recorded). Beyond their being used in two different protocols, there are actually subtle differences in the operation of the two mechanisms. So what is the difference?

Before we dive into differences, let’s discuss the similarities. We’ll use the illustration below as a basis for discussion.

Q1 and Q2 illustrate the operation of a link state protocol without any optimization on a broadcast network, with Q1 showing the network, and Q2 showing the resulting shortest path tree. Q3 and Q4 illustrate link state operation with optimization over a broadcast link. It’s important to differentiate between building a shortest path tree (SPT) across the broadcast link and flooding across the broadcast link—flooding is where the primary differences lie in the handling of broadcast links in the two protocols.

Let’s consider building the SPT first. Both protocols operate roughly the same in this Continue reading

Worth Reading: Are Blockchains the Most Expensive Database?

One of the oft-made claims about Bitcoin and its blockchain transaction ledger is that they make transactions really cheap, so you can pay someone anywhere in the world for free, or close to it. But when you look closer, is that really true? Not by a long shot. -via CircleID

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Worth Reading: On the Quants and the Creatives

One of the things I find most interesting about the history of advertising is the long-running conflict between the “creatives” and their more quantitative, data-driven opponents within ad agencies. It’s a long-running, widespread opposition between a more humanistic, intuitive, interpretative style of decision-making and professional practice and a more rules-driven, empirical, formalistic approach. -via Easily Distracted

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Securing BGP: A Case Study (10)

The next proposed (and actually already partially operational) system on our list is the Router Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) system, which is described in RFC7115 (and a host of additional drafts and RFCs). The RPKI systems is focused on solving a single solution: validating that the originating AS is authorized to originate a particular prefix. An example will be helpful; we’ll use the network below.

(this is a graphic pulled from a presentation, rather than one of my usual line drawings)

Assume, for a moment, that AS65002 and AS65003 both advertise the same route, 2001:db8:0:1::/64, towards AS65000. How can the receiver determine if both of these two advertisers can actually reach the destination, or only one can? And, if only one can, how can AS65000 determine which one is the “real thing?” This is where the RPKI system comes into play. A very simplified version of the process looks something like this (assuming AS650002 is the true owner of 2001:db8:0:1::/64):

• AS65002 obtains, from the Regional Internet Registry (labeled the RIR in the diagram), a certificate showing AS65002 has been issued 2001:db8:0:1::/64.
• AS65002 places this certificate into a local database that is synchronized with all the other operators participating in Continue reading