Russ
Author Archives: Russ
- Home → Author's archive:
Russ
Short Take: Security as a Tradeoff
We often treat security as an absolute, “that which must be done, and done perfectly, or is of no value at all.” It’s time to take this myth head on, and think about how we should really think about security.
The Network Collective: State of the Podcast
In this edition of the Network Collective, Eyvonne, Jordan, and I talk about where the ‘cast has been, and share some thoughts on where it is going. While we like technology as much as anyone else, the NC is really all about community.
In particular, we discuss the upcoming subscription service. We have a lot of new, exciting, material being recorded around the skills needed to be a better engineer exclusively for the subscription service. For instance, we’ve started a series on communication that does not take the standard line, but looks at how to communicate from the perspective of our experience in living on every possible side of the network engineering world, and developing and delivering every possible kind of content. And we have our first Q&A guest lined up, as well as a lot of fantastic material from Rachel Traylor already being recorded. This is going to be fantastic material, designed to push your career forward in a way that includes technology, but goes beyond technical skills, as well.
Research: Robustness in Complex Systems
While the network engineering world tends to use the word resilience to describe a system that will support rapid change in the real world, another word often used in computer science is robustness. What makes a system robust or resilient? If you ask a network engineer this question, the most likely answer you will get is something like there is no single point of failure. This common answer, however, does not go “far enough” in describing resilience. For instance, it is at least sometimes the case that adding more redundancy into a network can actually harm MTTR. A simple example: adding more links in parallel can cause the control plane to converge more slowly; at some point, the time to converge can be reduced enough to offset the higher path availability.
In other cases, automating the response to a change in the network can harm MTTR. For instance, we often nail a static route up and redistribute that, rather than redistributing live routing information between protocols. Experience shows that sometimes not reacting automatically is better than reacting automatically.
This post will look at a paper that examines robustness more deeply, Robustness in Complexity Systems,” by Steven Gribble. While this Continue reading
Weekend Reads 051818: Botnets and Throwhammer
Exploitation of Rowhammer attack just got easier. Dubbed ‘Throwhammer,’ the newly discovered technique could allow attackers to launch Rowhammer attack on the targeted systems just by sending specially crafted packets to the vulnerable network cards over the local area network. Known since 2012, Rowhammer is a severe issue with recent generation dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips in which repeatedly accessing a row of memory Continue reading
