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History of Networking: Networking at Google with Richard Hay

Google fascinates network engineers because of the sheer scale of their operations, and their obvious influence over the way networks are built and operated. In this episode of the History of Networking, Richard Hay joins Donald Sharp and Russ White to talk about some past designs and stories of failure and success in one of the world’s largest operating networks.

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Weekend Reads 082820

CENTR has published a white paper separating registry lock services into two standardized models. This categorization and the included recommendations can help top-level domain registries (re)design their registry lock services.

Simply stated: No matter how sophisticated your security software is, data cannot be simultaneously used and secured. But that may be changing soon.

Blockchain technology is going to change everything: the shipping industry, the financial system, government … in fact, what won’t it change? But enthusiasm for it mainly stems from a lack of knowledge and understanding. The blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.

Or you could reduce all of that complexity to a single roll of 25 dice into a plastic box.

Multitenancy is a common pattern in Kubernetes. Many organizations deploy Kubernetes-as-a-Service, where one cluster houses many tenants and workloads. This pattern might sound familiar, as cloud computing services like AWS, Azure, and GCP have enabled multiple customers (tenants) to run their business-critical workloads in a single cluster for years.

As gaming grows in stature in the lives of Americans during the pandemic, it has highlighted the extraordinary grip that two of the four tech companies under investigation have over the white-hot industry.

In general Continue reading

Technologies that Didn’t: The Fiber Distributed Data Interface

Token Ring, in its original form, was—on paper—a very capable physical transport. For instance, because of the token passing capabilities, it could make use of more than 90% of the available bandwidth. In contrast, Ethernet systems, particularly early Ethernet systems using a true “single wire” broadcast domain, cannot achieve nearly that kind of utilization—hence “every device on its own switch port.” The Fiber Distributed Data Interface, or FDDI, is like Token Ring in many ways. For instance, FDDI uses a token to determine when a station connected to the ring can transmit, enabling efficient use of bandwidth.

And yet, Ethernet is the common carrier of almost all wired networks today, and even wireless standards mimic Ethernet’s characteristics. What happened to FDDI?

FDDI is a 100Mbit/second optical standard based on token bus, which used an improved timed token version of the token passing scheme developed for token ring networks. This physical layer protocol standard had a number of fairly unique features. It was a 100Mbit/second standard at a time when Ethernet offered a top speed of 10Mbits/second. Since FDDI could operate over a single mode fiber, it could support distances of 200 kilometers, or around 120 miles. Because it was Continue reading

The White Board and the Simulation

In the argument between OSPF and BGP in the data center fabric over at Justin’s blog, I am decidedly in the camp of IS-IS. Rather than lay my reasons out here, however (a topic for another blog post?), I want to focus on something else Justin said that I think is incredibly important for network engineers to understand.

I think whiteboards are the most important tool for network design currently available, which makes me sad. I wish that wasn’t true, I want much better tools. I can’t even tell you the number of disasters averted by 2-3 great network engineers arguing over a whiteboard.

I remember—way back—when I was working on the problems around making a link-state protocol work well in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET), we had two competing solutions presented to the IETF. The first solution was primarily based on whiteboarding through various options and coming up with one that should reduce flooding to an acceptable level. The second was less optimal on the whiteboard but supported by simulations showing it should reduce flooding more effectively.

Which solution “won?” I don’t know what “winning” might mean here, but the solution designed on the whiteboard has Continue reading

Weekend Reads 082120

When a zero-day vulnerability is exploited in the wild, it’s essential to identify the bug at the root of the attack. This “root cause analysis” informs researchers how an attack unfolded.

The House Judiciary chairman was closing in on his Perry Mason moment with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Fortified with “hot” internal company documents, Rep. Jerrold Nadler was building his case at a hearing that seemed almost like a trial for Facebook and three other tech giants over alleged anti-competitive tactics.

While it’s true consumers have largely moved on, data centers are still looking for higher capacity hard drives. That’s why Western Digital (WD) developed new enterprise drives, which are packing what the company calls “ePMR” (energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording). For simplicity’s sake, we’ll stick with energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR).

Respondents to Tripwire’s survey revealed that they’re specifically worried about their employers’ cloud security. Indeed, 37% of participants indicated that risk management capabilities in the cloud were at least somewhat worse in the cloud than in other parts of the organization’s infrastructure.

In our previous blog about IcedID, we explored some of the changes in the malware and how it tries to evade detection. We also detailed how threat actors Continue reading

History of Networking: An African Perspective of the Internet

Dawit Bekele began his journey with the Internet while at college—but on returning to Africa, he discovered there was very little connectivity. While he was not involved in the initial stages of engineering the Internet in Africa, he began as an early user and proponent of connecting his home continent, and is now part of the Internet Society, helping to grow connectivity.

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Unsolicited Multicast: Random Thoughts on the LFN White Paper

A short while back, the Linux Foundation (Networking), or LFN, published a white paper about the open source networking ecosystem. Rather than review the paper, or try to find a single theme, I decided to just write down “random thoughts” as I read through it. This is the (rather experimental) result.

The paper lists five goals of the project which can be reduced to three: reducing costs, increasing operator’s control over the network, and increasing security (by increasing code inspection). One interesting bit is the pairing of cost reduction with increasing control. Increasing control over a network generally means treating it less like an opaque box and more like a disaggregated set of components, each of which can be tuned in some way to improve the fit between network services, network performance, and business requirements. The less a network is an opaque box, however, the more time and effort required to manage it. This only makes sense—tuning a network to perform better requires time and talent, both of which cost money.

The offsetting point here is disaggregation and using open source can save money—although in my experience it never does. Again, running disaggregated software and hardware requires time and talent, Continue reading

Weekend Reads 081420

The CIS Top 20 Critical Security Controls give you a set of steps. Start from the top, and work your down the list, adding layers of security along the way. They start with the basics. Knowing what is changing in your environment and how things are configured are two very basic parts of the 20 Controls.

I have a system with c servers, each of which can only handle a single concurrent request, and has no internal queuing. The servers sit behind a load balancer, which contains an infinite queue. An unlimited number of clients offer c * 0.8 requests per second to the load balancer on average.

Security researchers have discovered more than 400 pieces of vulnerable code inside the Qualcomm Snapdragon digital signal processor (DSP) chip that powers millions of high-end smartphones from Google, Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, OnePlus, and other device manufacturers.

The fundamental technologies for creating digital clones of people — text, audio, and video that sound and look like a specific person — have rapidly advanced and are within striking distance of a future in which digital avatars can sound and act like specific people, Tamaghna Basu, co-founder and chief technology officer of neoEYED, a Continue reading

Deterministic Networking and New IP

For those not following the current state of the ITU, a proposal has been put forward to (pretty much) reorganize the standards body around “New IP.” Don’t be confused by the name—it’s exactly what it sounds like, a proposal for an entirely new set of transport protocols to replace the current IPv4/IPv6/TCP/QUIC/routing protocol stack nearly 100% of the networks in operation today run on. Ignoring, for the moment, the problem of replacing the entire IP infrastructure, what can we learn from this proposal?

What I’d like to focus on is deterministic networking. Way back in the days when I was in the USAF, one of the various projects I worked on was called PCI. The PCI network was a new system designed to unify the personnel processing across the entire USAF, so there were systems (Z100s, 200s, and 250s) to be installed in every location across the base where personnel actions were managed. Since the only wiring we had on base at the time was an old Strowger mainframe, mechanical crossbars at a dozen or so BDFs, and varying sizes of punch-downs at BDFs and IDFs, everything for this system needed to be punched- or wrapped-down as physical circuits.

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Weekend Reads 080620

Due to the increasing use of extensions that block third-party tracking, tracking providers introduced a new technique called Canonical Name (CNAME) cloaking.

And the ugly truth is that you’ve become addicted to arguing with the “End Is Nigh” sandwich board guy. The guy you used to quietly skirt, you now seek him out and you bring your friends and for some idiotic reason you think that if you just post a little bit more you’re going to get him to see reason. Or put him in his place.

On July 27, two companies — open source project management firm Snyk and development services firm xs:code — announced they have teamed up to provide a browser plug-in that will give developers important metrics by which to gauge the security of open source projects.

In any case, many of us are now living at work. And living at work means you have a new responsibility to your coworkers and clients: how you sound, how you look, and the visual appeal of your workspace is now your problem. You may feel that this isn’t your responsibility, but your home is now your office.

Modern applications, and the cloud platforms upon which they are Continue reading

The Hedge Episode 47: Scott Burleigh and the Bundle Protocol

In this episode of the Hedge, Scott Burleigh joins Alvaro Retana and Russ White to discuss the Bundle Protocol, which is designed to support delay tolerant data delivery over intermittently available or “stressed” networks. Examples include interstellar communication, email transmission over networks where access points move around (carrying data with them), etc. You can learn more about delay tolerant networking here, and read the most recent draft specification here.

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History of Networking: Stan Hanks and GRE

GRE was the first tunneling protocol ever designed and deployed—and although it largely been overtaken by VXLAN and other tunnel protocols, it is still in widespread use today. For this episode of the History of Networking, Stan Hanks, the inventor of GRE—and hence the inventor of the concept of tunneling in packet switched networks—joins us to describe how and why GRE tunneling was invented.

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The 4D Network

I think we can all agree networks have become too complex—and this complexity is a result of the network often becoming the “final dumping ground” of every problem that seems like it might impact more than one system, or everything no-one else can figure out how to solve. It’s rather humorous, in fact, to see a lot of server and application folks sitting around saying “this networking stuff is so complex—let’s design something better and simpler in our bespoke overlay…” and then falling into the same complexity traps as they start facing the real problems of policy and scale.

This complexity cannot be “automated away.” It can be smeared over with intent, but we’re going to find—soon enough—that smearing intent on top of complexity just makes for a dirty kitchen and a sub-standard meal.

While this is always “top of mind” in my world, what brings it to mind this particular week is a paper by Jen Rexford et al. (I know Jen isn’t on the lead position in the author list, but still…) called A Clean Slate 4D Approach to Network Control and Management. Of course, I can appreciate the paper in part because I agree with a Continue reading

Weekend Reads 073120

More than 4.7 million sources in five countries — the US, China, South Korea, Russia, and India — were used to level distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against victims in the second quarter of 2020, with the portmap protocol most frequently used as an amplification vector to create massive data floods, security and services firm A10 Networks says in its threat report for the second quarter.

Thousands of people graduate from colleges and universities each year with cybersecurity or computer science degrees only to find employers are less than thrilled about their hands-on, foundational skills. Here’s a look at a recent survey that identified some of the bigger skills gaps, and some thoughts about how those seeking a career in these fields can better stand out from the crowd.

Three standards for email security that are supposed to verify the source of a message have critical implementation differences that could allow attackers to send emails from one domain and have them verified as sent from a different — more legitimate-seeming — domain, says a research team who will present their findings at the virtual Black Hat conference next month.

We’ve tried to use GUI to simplify the YAML file. But Continue reading

The Hedge Podcast #46: The Value of a College Degree

While many network engineers think about getting a certification, not many think about going after a degree. Is there value in getting a degree for the network engineer? If so, what is it? What kinds of things do you learn in a degree program for network engineering? Eric Osterweil, a professor at George Mason University, joins Jeremy Filliben and Russ White on this episode of the Hedge to consider degrees for network engineers.

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On the ‘net: Internet Consolidation

Did you know that today Video, gaming and social media account for almost 80% of the world’s internet traffic? The change in the composition of traffic has been accompanied by a dramatic change in the way content is delivered to the internet user: ISPs and transit providers have diminished in number and importance as the power and profile of a few Content Distribution Networks has increased as content is being pushed closer to the edge. But isn’t that just competition at work? What are the long-term consequences of such a change? In the second episode of our three-part series on “Internet Consolidation”, we talk to Russ White, co-host of The History of Networking and The Hedge podcast and a distinguished infrastructure architect and internet transit and routing expert.

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