Russ

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Think Like an Engineer, not a Cheerleader

When you see a chart like this—

—you probably think if I were staking my career on technologies, I would want to jump from the older technology to the new just at the point where that adoption curve starts to really drive upward.

Over at ACM Queue, Peter J. Denning has an article up on just this topic. He argues that if you understand the cost curve and tipping point of any technology, you can predict—with some level of accuracy—the point at which the adoption s-curve is going to begin its exponential growth phase.

Going back many years, I recognize this s-curve. It was used for FDDI, ATM, Banyan Vines, Novell Netware, and just about every new technology that has ever entered the market.

TL;DR
  • There are technology jump points where an entire market will move from one technology to another
  • From a career perspective, it is sometimes wise to jump to a new technology when at the early stages of such a jump
  • However, there are risks invovled, such as hidden costs that prevent the jump from occurring
  • Hence, you need to be cautious and thoughtful when considering jumping to a new technology

 

The problem with this curve, Continue reading

Weekend Reads 090718

Did the passage of gDPR impact the amount of spam on the ‘net, or not? It depends on who you ask.

The folks at the Recorded Future blog examined the volume of spam and the number of registrations for domains used in phishing activity, and determined the volume of spam was not impacted by the implementation of Europe’s new privacy laws.

There were many concerns that after the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect on May 25, 2018, there would be an uptick in spam. While it has only been three months since the GDPR went into effect, based on our research, not only has there not been an increase in spam, but the volume of spam and new registrations in spam-heavy generic top-level domains (gTLDs) has been on the decline.

John Levine at CircleID, however, argues the measures used in the Recorded Future piece are not useful measures of spam volume in relation to the controls imposed by GDPR:

To understand the effect of GDPR, the relevant questions are: Is GDPR enabling damage, because it makes detection, blocking, and mitigation harder?

Note that the CircleID article only addresses the domain registration question, and does Continue reading

Research: DNSSEC in the Wild

The DNS system is, unfortunately, rife with holes like Swiss Cheese; man-in-the-middle attacks can easily negate the operation of TLS and web site security. To resolve these problems, the IETF and the DNS community standardized a set of cryptographic extensions to cryptographically sign all DNS records. These signatures rely on public/private key pairs that are transitively signed (forming a signature chain) from individual subdomains through the Top Level Domain (TLD). Now that these standards are in place, how heavily is DNSSEC being used in the wild? How much safer are we from man-in-the-middle attacks against TLS and other transport encryption mechanisms?

TL;DR
  • DNSSEC is enabled on most top level domains
  • However, DNSSEC is not widely used or deployed beyond these TLDs

 

Three researchers published an article in Winter ;login; describing their research into answering this question (membership and login required to read the original article). The result? While more than 90% of the TLDs in DNS are DNSEC enabled, DNSSEC is still not widely deployed or used. To make matter worse, where it is deployed, it isn’t well deployed. The article mentions two specific problems that appear to plague DNSSEC implementations.

First, on the server side, a number of Continue reading

Worth Reading: Using DNS as a Single Signon

Internet-wide identity management is one of the hot issues currently — dealing with hundreds of separate usernames and passwords is insecure and unfriendly for users. Increasingly, people use their social network accounts to log into websites, which works well, but forces you to allow either Google or Facebook to track all your logins — you don’t have a lot of choice. —Vittorio Bertola @APNIC

Is BGP Good Enough?

In a recent podcast, Ivan and Dinesh ask why there is a lot of interest in running link state protocols on data center fabrics. They begin with this point: if you have less than a few hundred switches, it really doesn’t matter what routing protocol you run on your data center fabric. Beyond this, there do not seem to be any problems to be solved that BGP cannot solve, so… why bother with a link state protocol? After all, BGP is much simpler than any link state protocol, and we should always solve all our problems with the simplest protocol possible.

TL;DR
  • BGP is both simple and complex, depending on your perspective
  • BGP is sometimes too much, and sometimes too little for data center fabrics
  • We are danger of treating every problem as a nail, because we have decided BGP is the ultimate hammer

 
Will these these contentions stand up to a rigorous challenge?

I will begin with the last contention first—BGP is simpler than any link state protocol. Consider the core protocol semantics of BGP and a link state protocol. In a link state protocol, every network device must have a synchronized copy of the Link State Continue reading

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