Hedge 217: Doug Madory and BGP Security Incidents

We hear a lot about BGP security incidents–but what is really going on? How often do these happen, and how much damage do they do? Doug Madory, who monitors these things for Kentik, joins Russ White and Tom Ammon to talk about BGP security in the wild.

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Hedge 216: Automation Success Stories

One thing we often hear about automation is that its hard because there are so many different interfaces. On this episode of the Hedge, Daniel Teycheney joins Ethan Banks and Russ White to discuss how they started from a simple idea and ended up building an automation system that does cross vendor boundaries within a larger discussion about automation and APIs.

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Weekend Reads 040124

Exclusive Dell’s “return to office” mandate has left employees confused about which offices they can use and the future of their jobs – and concerned the initiative is a stealth layoff program that will disproportionately harm women at the IT giant.

FDC Pat Gelsinger wants to make Intel the world’s second largest chip manufacturer by 2030, and that means serving businesses the x86 giant has traditionally seen as competitors.

Intel revealed a new road map at its Intel Foundry Services (IFS) Direct event that will take the company into 2027. Itﾒs an extension of the road map Intel laid out nearly three years ago, shortly after Intelﾒs CEO Pat Gelsinger took the reins of the company.

It is not known who pilfered the information nor their motives, but this leak provides a first-of-its-kind look at the internal operations of a state-affiliated hacking contractor.

Apple has announced a new post-quantum cryptographic protocol called PQ3 that it said will be integrated into iMessage to secure the messaging platform against future attacks arising from the threat of a practical quantum computer.

Juniper Networks, currently in the process of being acquired by HPE, has been accused of violating US securities laws in a shareholder Continue reading

Hedge 215: Old Engineering Quotes

Reading people from the past can sometimes show us where today’s blind spots are–but sometimes we can just find the blind spots of the people who lived then. In this episode of the Hedge, Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ finish going through a selection of quotes from an engineering book published in 1911. This time, we find there are some things to agree with, but also some to disagree with.

Weekend Reads 022334

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that laws requiring crippled encryption and extensive data retention violate the European Convention on Human Rights – a decision that may derail European data surveillance legislation known as Chat Control.

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) says that “better than 80% of all electronic system failures that are attributed to power anomalies are actually the result of electrical wiring or grounding errors or are generated by other loads within the customer’s facility.”

With research making considerable progress in designing quantum computers, it is time to consider the scenario that usable quantum computing will become a reality in the future. In this post, we discuss the testbed that we are setting up to empirically evaluate the impact of quantum-safe cryptography algorithms on DNSSEC.

Late last year, Congress extended Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and, in doing so, secured the nation’s warrantless surveillance powers until April 2024. With that month fast approaching, House Republicans have unveiled a new package to reauthorize those same powers, within limits.

Google has announced that it’s open-sourcing Magika, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool to identify file types, to help defenders accurately detect binary Continue reading

Hedge 214: Hardware Offloading

Network operators increasingly rely on generic hosts, rather than specialized routers (appliances) to forward traffic. Much of the performance on hosts relies on offloading packets switching and processing to specialized hardware on the network interface card. In this episode of the Hedge, Krzysztof Wróbel and Maciej Rabęda join Russ and Tom to talk about hardware offloading.

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You can find out more about hardware offloading here.

Weekend Reads 021624

This year, I’ve had the opportunity to work alongside some of the highest- performing individuals in our profession. I’ve taken that opportunity to observe their work, look for patterns, and to try to identify the attributes that contribute to their success, not only as technologists but as humans.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s dream of establishing a network of chip factories to fuel the growth of AI may be much, much wilder than feared.

Advanced persistent threat (APT) groups are more dangerous than your run-of-the-mill cybercriminals. They, after all, trail their sights not only on financial gain but loftier targets such as wreaking havoc on entire nations.

In this episode of PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the role of the Domain Name System (DNS) in directing where your applications connect to, and where content comes from.

As you awoke one morning from uneasy dreams you found yourself transformed in your bed into a software engineer. A calamity that I find all too familiar.

Whether you want to land a new job or make your contributions count, effective communication goes a long way.

At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bit about the resolution to “stay human” in Continue reading

Hedge 213: Batfish with Ratul Mahajan

Network configuration analysis has always been the domain of commercial-grade software. Batfish changes all that with an open source, community-supported tool that can find errors and guarantees the correctness of planned or current network configurations. Ratul Mahajan joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to talk about this new tool, its capabilities, and the importance of network configuration analysis.
 

 
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You can find out more about Batfish at the project home page, and in this paper by Ratul.

Weekend Reads 020924

Artificial intelligence and the chips that fuel its evolution have given rise to a new arms race between the US and China.

Alongside concerning recent security news, there has been a media-wide rise of references to ‘credential stuffing’. This is a term that doesn’t convey very much, but as it’s the accepted term inside the infosec community, it’s probably here to stay.

In October, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed a set of rules that if implemented would transform how financial institutions handle personal data about their customers.

In a far cry from the early 2000s, most U.S. adults today say they use the internet (95%), have a smartphone (90%) or subscribe to high-speed internet at home (80%), according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted May 19 to Sept. 5, 2023.

Cloudflare was a victim of the wide-ranging Okta supply-chain campaign last fall, with a data breach impacting its Atlassian Bitbucket, Confluence, and Jira platforms beginning on Thanksgiving Day.

Honeypots are usually used as an intrusion detection tool. Many security researchers, including Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTS), deploy honeypots, to learn about tools, tactics, and the attacker’s infrastructure.

AWS could rake in between $400 million and Continue reading

Hedge 212: Shift Left? w/Chris Romeo

How many times have you heard you should “shift left” in the last few years? What does “shift left” even mean? Even if it had meaning once, does it still have any meaning today? Should we abandon the concept, or just the term? Listen in as Chris Romeo joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to talk about the origin, meaning, and modern uselessness of the term “shift left.”
 

 
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On Writing Complexity

I’ve been on a bit of a writer’s break after finishing the CCST book, but it’s time to rekindle my “thousand words a day” habit. As always, one part of this is thinking about how I write—is there anything I need to change? Tools, perhaps, or style?

What about the grade level complexity of my writing? I’ve never really paid attention to this, but I’m working on contributing to a site regularly that does. So maybe I should.

I tend to write to the tenth or eleventh-grade level, even when writing “popular material,” like blog posts. The recommended level is around the eighth-grade level. Is this something I need to change?

It seems the average person considers anything above the eighth-grade reading level “too hard” to read, so they give up. Every reading level calculation I’ve looked at essentially uses word and sentence length as proxies for complexity. Long words and sentences intimidate people.

On the other hand, measuring the reading grade level can seem futile. There are plenty of complex concepts described by one- and two-syllable words. Short sentences can still have lots of meaning.

Further, the reading grade level does not tell you if the sentence makes sense. Continue reading

Weekend Reads 020224

Everybody likes good news, especially at the beginning of the corporate year, and we are happy to report that TSMC’s revenues in the fourth quarter ended in December 2023 were only down 1.5 percent year on year to $19.62 billion, and were up 13.6 sequentially from the third quarter

HP CEO Enrique Lores admitted this week that the company’s long-term objective is “to make printing a subscription” when he was questioned about the company’s approach to third-party replacement ink suppliers.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has proposed creating a new top-level domain (TLD) and never allowing it to be delegated in the global domain name system (DNS) root.

What is cool about DNS over HTTPS is that, well, it uses HTTPS. Because HTTP clients are plentiful and well understood by many developers, it should make for a pretty simple implementation.

However, VPN is no longer good enough to secure remote work. For instance, VPN gives remote employees full network access to corporate resources when they login.

Universally, every person that I put the question to dismissed FWA wireless as a temporary technology with no real long-term legs.

Apple launched the original 128 kB Continue reading

Hedge 211: Learning About Learning

How much have you thought about the way you learn–or how to effectively teach beginners? There is a surprising amount of research into how humans learn, and how best to create material to teach them. In this roundtable episode, Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ discuss a recent paper from the Communications of the ACM, 10 Things Software Developers Should Learn about Learning.

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Weekend Reads 012624

A study by Consumer Reports and non-profit The Markup concluded that for the average lone Facebook user, 2,230 companies, and in some cases more than 7,000, will hand over that person’s information to Facebook.

2023’s copious chatter about generative AI has not translated into surging semiconductor revenues across the industry, according to analyst firm Gartner.

According to a report by industry analyst Trendforce, the tech company will up the base memory requirement on Windows 12 to 16GB in accordance with its standard for running its AI assistant Copilot at minimum efficiency.

Imagine downloading an open weights AI language model, and all seems good at first, but it later turns malicious.

The supermassive leak contains data from numerous previous breaches, comprising an astounding 12 terabytes of information, spanning over a mind-boggling 26 billion records.

In order for CPU and AI Accelerators/GPUs to effectively work with each other for larger training models, the communication bandwidth of the PCIe-based interconnects between them needs to scale to keep up with the exponentially increasing size of parameters and data sets used in AI models.

It was one thing to support cell towers when they were used for rural cellphone coverage. But it’s a new equation Continue reading

Hedge 210: Eric Chou and Technical Publishing

Have you ever thought about publishing a book or recording a professional video? It’s not as simple as proposing an idea, doing the work, and becoming famous (or infamous, as the case might be). Eric Chou joins Rick Graziani and Russ to talk about the ins and outs of technical publishing. We are planning a part 2 of this in a few months to cover things we left on the table for later discussion.

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Weekend Reads 011924

Pressure to resolve incidents quickly that often comes from peers, leadership, and members of affected teams only adds to the chaos of incident management, causing more human errors. Coordinating incidents such as this through the process of having an Incident Commander role has shown more controllable outcomes for organizations around the world.

The Kimsuky Group, believed to be a North Korea-based advanced persistent threat (APT) group active since 2013, struck again several times this year.

QUIC supports connection migration, allowing the client to migrate an established QUIC connection from one path to the other. QUIC’s path validation mechanism can be used to attack the peer and make it consume an unbounded amount of memory.

The NVM Express consortium has updated its specifications by adding a Computational Storage Feature, creating a standardized way for applications to talk to storage devices that include some processing capability.

Post Office chief exec Nick Read left British politicians shocked with his evidence before a Parliamentary committee yesterday after he admitted he could not say when the public body at the center of the historic miscarriage of justice knew when its system was at fault.

We’re only a few weeks into 2024, and violations of people’s Continue reading

Hedge 209: User Interface Stupidity

User interface design is notoriously bad for networking gear–but why, and what can we do about it? Frank Seesink joins Tom and Russ to talk about user interface stupidity.

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Making Networking Cool Again? (2)

Network engineering is not “going away.” Network engineering is not less important than it was yesterday, last year, or even a decade ago.

But there still seems to be a gap somewhere. There are fewer folks interested than we need. We need more folks who want to work as full-time network engineers, and more folks with network engineering skills diffused within the larger IT community. More of both is the right answer if we’re going to continue building large-scale systems that work. The real lack of enthusiasm for learning network engineering is hurting all of IT, not just network engineering.

How do we bridge this gap? We’re engineers. We solve problems. This seems to be a problem we might be able to solve (unlike human nature). Let’s try to solve it.

As you might have guessed, I have some ideas. These are not the only ideas in the world—feel free to think up more!

If you walk into a robotics class, even an introductory robotics class, you see people … building robots. If you walk into a coding class, even an introductory one, you see people … writing software. If you walk into a network network engineering class you Continue reading

Weekend Reads 011224

Yes, the weekend has pretty much already passed, but still …

The WailingCrab malware has gained notoriety for its stealth. IBM X-Force security researchers recently published an in-depth analysis of the malware, which has been abusing Internet of Things (IoT) messaging protocol MQTT.

SpaceX successfully launched 21 satellites, including the first six Starlink satellites equipped with “Direct to Cell” capabilities.

MTL mode is a technique developed by Verisign researchers that can reduce the operational impact of a signature scheme when authenticating an evolving series of messages.

While Kubernetes adoption continues to soar, it has become a prime target for cyberattacks. Unfortunately, Kubernetes clusters are complex and can be difficult to secure. Safeguarding your Kubernetes environment requires a solid understanding of the common attack chains that pose a threat to your infrastructure.

Going into 2023, the big telcos had publicly announced plans to build 9.4 million fiber passings, but during the year, they collectively pared that back expectations to 6.5 million passings.

A new exploitation technique called Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) smuggling can be weaponized by threat actors to send spoofed emails with fake sender addresses while bypassing security measures.

The Atomic Stealer, also known as “AMOS,” first Continue reading

Hedge 208: The Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been brewing for many years–but how do all these new devices impact your network? Are there new concepts and architectures you need to learn to get a handle on IoT? Jasbir Singh, author of a new book on IoT architecture, joins Tom and Russ for this episode of the Hedge.

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