Worth Reading: Silicon Photonics

Although photons of light dominate the long-distance information superhighways of the Internet, electrons remain the workhorses that move and process information at the local level. Visionaries have imagined for decades that power-efficient light-based communication would migrate to ever-shorter distances and eventually move onto silicon chips alongside transistors at the centimeter scale. -via the ACM

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Worth Reading: NOMA

We are interested in undertaking and supporting activities that help maintain a healthy Internet. To that end, we are pleased to announce a new partnership. The Internet Society is working with Thinking Cat Enterprises on the Techark Network Operator Measurement Activity (NOMA) project to unlock more operator-based measurements that tell us something about the health of the Internet. The first target of NOMA is to develop an access network’s perspective on IPv6 performance as one indicator of the Internet’s health. -via the ISOC

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Security ‘net: Privacy and Cybercrime Edition

DDoS blackmail is an increasingly common form of cybercrime, it appears. The general pattern is something like this: the administrator of a large corporate site receives an email, threatening a large scale DDoS attack unless the company deposits some amount of bitcoin in an untraceable account. Sometimes, if the company doesn’t comply, the blackmail is followed up with a small “sample attack,” and a second contact or email asking for more bitcoin than the first time.

The best reaction to these types of things is either to work with your service provider to hunker down and block the attack, or to simply ignore the threat. For instance, there has been a spate of threats from someone called Armada Collective over the last several weeks that appear to be completely empty; while threats have been reported, no action appears to have been taken.

We heard from more than 100 existing and prospective CloudFlare customers who had received the Armada Collective’s emailed threats. We’ve also compared notes with other DDoS mitigation vendors with customers that had received similar threats. -via Cloudflare

The bottom line is this: you should never pay against these threats. It’s always better to contact your provider and work Continue reading

Worth Reading: Trusting Robots in an Emergency

In emergencies, people may trust robots too much for their own safety, a new study suggests. In a mock building fire, test subjects followed instructions from an “Emergency Guide Robot” even after the machine had proven itself unreliable – and after some participants were told that robot had broken down.

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Worth Reading: Neutron Networking

Neutron server, residing in a control node, is responsible for orchestrating and provisioning of all virtual networks within an OpenStack environment. Its goal is to enable end-to-end reachability among the VMs and between the VMs and external subnets. To do that, Neutron uses concepts that should be very familiar to every network engineer like subnet, router, firewall, DHCP and NAT.

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Securing BGP: A Case Study (9)

There are a number of systems that have been proposed to validate (or secure) the path in BGP. To finish off this series on BGP as a case study, I only want to look at three of them. At some point in the future, I will probably write a couple of posts on what actually seems to be making it to some sort of deployment stage, but for now I just want to compare various proposals against the requirements outlined in the last post on this topic (you can find that post here).

The first of these systems is BGPSEC—or as it was known before it was called BGPSEC, S-BGP. I’m not going to spend a lot of time explaining how S-BGP works, as I’ve written a series of posts over at Packet Pushers on this very topic:

Part 1: Basic Operation
Part 2: Protections Offered
Part 3: Replays, Timers, and Performance
Part 4: Signatures and Performance
Part 5: Leaks

Considering S-BGP against the requirements:

• Centralized versus decentralized balance:S-BGP distributes path validation information throughout the internetwork, as this information is actually contained in a new attribute carried with route advertisements. Authorization and authentication are implicitly centralized, however, with the Continue reading

Worth Reading: Cisco Unified Code Base

Cisco had an interesting and very promising presentation at Network Field Day 11 about an effort to unify their codebase for a part of their product line. Jagbir Kang, product manager for enterprise switching, provided an overview of the IOS XE Denali (16.1.1) release which will unify the development trains for the Cat 3850 and 3650 switches with the ASR1000 routing platform. -via Netcraftsmen

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Worth Reading: A Systematic Analysis of the Juniper Dual EC Incident

In December 2015, Juniper Networks announced that unknown attackers had added unauthorized code to ScreenOS, the operating system for their NetScreen VPN routers. This code created two vulnerabilities: an authentication bypass that enabled remote administrative access, and a second vulnerability that allowed passive decryption of VPN traffic. Reverse engineering of ScreenOS binaries revealed that the first of these vulnerabilities was a conventional back door in the SSH password checker.

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Worth Reading: A Systematic Analysis of the Juniper Dual EC Incident

In December 2015, Juniper Networks announced that unknown attackers had added unauthorized code to ScreenOS, the operating system for their NetScreen VPN routers. This code created two vulnerabilities: an authentication bypass that enabled remote administrative access, and a second vulnerability that allowed passive decryption of VPN traffic. Reverse engineering of ScreenOS binaries revealed that the first of these vulnerabilities was a conventional back door in the SSH password checker.

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Worth Reading: Chromatic Dispersion

Chromatic dispersion of short optical pulses traversing optical fibers is a fundamental problem when it comes to optical transport. Signal distortion, if not properly compensated, will lead to inter-symbol interference that may result in data loss or traffic interruption. This paper describes the technologies used to compensate for chromatic dispersion and how to implement reliable optical connections between equipment nodes that could extend more than 100km apart. -Data Center Journal

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Worth Reading: Chromatic Dispersion

Chromatic dispersion of short optical pulses traversing optical fibers is a fundamental problem when it comes to optical transport. Signal distortion, if not properly compensated, will lead to inter-symbol interference that may result in data loss or traffic interruption. This paper describes the technologies used to compensate for chromatic dispersion and how to implement reliable optical connections between equipment nodes that could extend more than 100km apart. -Data Center Journal

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Worth Reading: How often does the government ask for your information?

In courtrooms across the country, tech companies and the government are battling over how much user data they should be required to give to law enforcement, and whether they should be allowed to tell users.These reports may have left people wondering: How often is the government really asking for my data? -MarketWatch

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Worth Reading: How often does the government ask for your information?

In courtrooms across the country, tech companies and the government are battling over how much user data they should be required to give to law enforcement, and whether they should be allowed to tell users.These reports may have left people wondering: How often is the government really asking for my data? -MarketWatch

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Buenos Aires Garden Statue

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Buenos Aires Garden Statue

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Worth Watching: IPv6 Measurements

How and what LinkedIn measures in IPv6 usage.

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Worth Watching: IPv6 Measurements

How and what LinkedIn measures in IPv6 usage.

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Worth Reading: Secret Court Takes Another Bite Out of the Fourth Amendment

Defenders of the NSA’s mass spying have lost an important talking point: that the erosion of our privacy and associational rights is justified given the focus of surveillance efforts on combating terrorism and protecting the national security. -Electronic Frontier Foundation

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Worth Reading: Secret Court Takes Another Bite Out of the Fourth Amendment

Defenders of the NSA’s mass spying have lost an important talking point: that the erosion of our privacy and associational rights is justified given the focus of surveillance efforts on combating terrorism and protecting the national security. -Electronic Frontier Foundation

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New Ways of Thinking

Rule 11 definitely applies to most new technology that’s being hyped (and overhyped) in the networking world. But while some things stay the same, others actually do change. From one of my readers—

Much of the current “trends” in networking are largely just new marketing-speak on old concepts, but some (I’ll propose) are actually new, or require new ways of thinking—which is which, or for a simpler version: how (really) should I change my thinking to reflect the new-networking-order?

This question rebounds through the networking industry today—how, really, do I need to change my thinking to cope with the new networking order? There are, on the face of it, three options available. Let me begin with a story from a prior career to set the stage.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I worked on airfield electronics and communication systems. Things like RADAR systems, wind speed measurement systems, TACANs, VORs, crypto hardware, MUX’s, inverse MUX’s, and even telephone switches. There was a point when I saw something interesting happening where I lived and spent my time. The TACAN and VOR, for instance, were replaced by new gear. Instead of half splitting, measuring things, and replacing individual components, Continue reading