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Weekend Reads 082418

During the 27th Usenix Security Symposium held in Baltimore, MD last week, a group of researchers from China revealed results obtained from a large-scale analysis DNS interceptions. @CircleID

The increasingly distributed nature of computing and the rapid growth in the number of the small connected devices that make up the Internet of Things (IoT) are combining with trends like the rise of silicon-level vulnerabilities highlighted by Spectre, Meltdown, and more recent variants to create an expanding and fluid security landscape that’s difficult for enterprises to navigate. —Jeffrey Burt @The Next Platform

Many online accounts allow you to supplement your password with a second form of identification, which can prevent some prevalent attacks. The second factors you can use to identify yourself include authenticator apps on your phone, which generate codes that change every 30 seconds, and security keys, small pieces of hardware similar in size and shape to USB drives. —Stuart Schechter @Medium

If this is a three-way tension, then it’s clear that we are not equals at the table here. It seems that as users we continually get short-changed when it comes to access to tools and technologies that can allow us to preserve our personal safety and security. Continue reading

Research: Facebook’s Edge Fabric

The Internet has changed dramatically over the last ten years; more than 70% of the traffic over the Internet is now served by ten Autonomous Systems (AS’), causing the physical topology of the Internet to be reshaped into more of a hub-and-spoke design, rather than the more familiar scale-free design (I discussed this in a post over at CircleID in the recent past, and others have discussed this as well). While this reshaping might be seen as a success in delivering video content to most Internet users by shortening the delivery route between the server and the user, the authors of the paper in review today argue this is not enough.

Brandon Schlinker, Hyojeong Kim, Timothy Cui, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Italo Cunha, James Quinn, Saif Hasan, Petr Lapukhov, and Hongyi Zeng. 2017. Engineering Egress with Edge Fabric: Steering Oceans of Content to the World. In Proceedings of the Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM ’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 418-431. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3098822.3098853

Why is this not enough? The authors point to two problems in the routing protocol tying the Internet together: BGP. First, they state that BGP is not Continue reading

Reaction: Nerd Knobs and Open Source in Network Software

This is an interesting take on where we are in the data networking world—

Tech is commoditizing, meaning that vendors in the space are losing feature differentiation. That happens for a number of reasons, the most obvious of which is that you run out of useful features. Other reasons include the difficulty in making less-obvious features matter to buyers, lack of insight by vendors into what’s useful to start off with, and difficulty in getting media access for any story that’s not a promise of total revolution. Whatever the reason, or combination of reasons, it’s getting harder for network vendors to promote features they offer as the reasons to buy their stuff. What’s left, obviously, is price. —Tom Nolle @CIMI

There are things here I agree with, and things I don’t agree with.

Tech is commoditizing. I’ve talked about this before; I think networking is commoditizing at the device level, and the days of appliance based networking are behind us. But are networks themselves a commodity? Not any more than any other system.

We are running out of useful features, so vendors are losing feature differentiation. This one is going to take a little longer… When I first started in Continue reading

Worth Reading: GitOps

You’ve written a new web application and would like it to be added to your organization’s web load balancer. The load balancer is complex; its configuration is maintained by highly trained experts on the network operations team. You file a ticket with the team, wait, wait, wait, have a discussion with the experts, wait, wait, wait, and finally your request is completed. Your application is now available, assuming they got it right on the first try. —Thomas A. Limoncelli @ACM

Weekend Reads 081618: New Vulnerabilities

Spectre and Meltdown are more than a new class of security holes. They’re deeply embedded in the fundamental design of recent generations of CPUs. So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that yet another major Intel chip security problem has been discovered: Foreshadow. —Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols @ZDNet

Foreshadow Attacks – Security researchers disclosed the details of three new speculative execution side-channel attacks that affect Intel processors. The new flaws, dubbed Foreshadow and L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF), were discovered by two independent research teams. —Pierluigi Paganini @Security Affairs

Security researchers at Check Point Software Technologies have discovered a new attack vector against the Android operating system that could potentially allow attackers to silently infect your smartphones with malicious apps or launch denial of service attacks. —Swati Khandelwal @The Hacker News

When a room filled with hundreds of security professionals erupts into applause, it’s notable. When that happens less than five minutes into a presentation, it’s remarkable. But that’s what transpired when security researcher Christopher Domas last week showed a room at Black Hat USA how to break the so-called ring-privilege model of modern CPU security. —Curtis Franklin Jr. @Dark Reading

Bought a new Android phone? What if I say your brand Continue reading

Reaction: Network software quality

Over at IT ProPortal, Dr Greg Law has an article up chiding the networking world for the poor software quality. To wit—

When networking companies ship equipment out containing critical bugs, providing remediation in response to their discovery can be almost impossible. Their engineers back at base often lack the data they need to reproduce the issue as it’s usually kept by clients on premise. An inability to cure a product defect could result in the failure of a product line, temporary or permanent withdrawal of a product, lost customers, reputational damage, and product reengineering expenses, any of which could have a material impact on revenue, margins, and net income.

Let me begin here: Dr. Law, you are correct—we have a problem with software quality. I think the problem is a bit larger than just the networking world—for instance, my family just purchased two new vehicles, a Volvo and a Fiat. Both have Android systems in the center screen. And neither will connect correctly with our Android based phones. It probably isn’t mission critical, like it could be for a network, but it is annoying.

But even given software quality is a widespread issue in our world, it is still Continue reading

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