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Worth Reading: GDPR meets whois

Many ICANN stakeholders are concerned that access to the public WHOIS database could change [because of GDPR]. —Jerry Malcom @EFF

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Weekend Reads 012618: Mostly Security and Legal Stuff

Before we begin, its worth mentioning that yes, yesssssssssssssssssssss, I did not have enough protection around my Gmail account. I’ve used Google Authenticator before, for my personal account and for various work emails, but I stopped using it at a certain point out of convenience. —Cody Brow @Medium

This report assesses the impact disclosure of data breaches has on the total returns and volatility of the affected companies’ stock, with a focus on the results relative to the performance of the firms’ peer industries, as represented through selected indices rather than the market as a whole. financial performance is considered over a range of dates from 3 days post-breach through 6 months post-breach, in order to provide a longer-term perspective on the impact of the breach announcement. —Russell Lange & Eric W. Burger @Journal of Information Privacy and Security

If it were not for the insatiable bandwidth needs of the twenty major hyperscalers and cloud builders, it is safe to say that the innovation necessary to get Ethernet switching and routing up to 200 Gb/sec or 400 Gb/sec might not have been done at the fast pace that the industry as been able to pull off. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @The Continue reading

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Blue Ridge Mountains

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Worth Reading: Quantum Computing and Cryptography

All encryption is based on substitution, from simple schemes we did as kids to complex non-repeating patterns based on a long numerical key. Modern encryption systems construct these keys using a combination of private and public keys with mathematical one-way functions. —Jonathan Homa @ECI

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One Weird Trick

I’m often asked what the trick is to become a smarter person—there are many answers, of course, which I mention in this video. But there is “one weird trick” many people don’t think about, which I focus on here.

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Worth Reading: Real Time Wide-Area TCP Latency Monitoring

With the increasing number of real-time applications and the radically new business models and use cases introduced by the 5G mobile architecture requiring interactive back-and-forth communication, user-perceived end-to-end latency is becoming an all-important factor for both users and network providers. —Richard Cziva @APNIC

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Worth Reading: Enabling Dual Stack on LinkedIn CDNs

A few months ago, LinkedIn surpassed the 50% IPv6 traffic milestone. In this post, we will look into the methodology we adopted to measure performance as we enabled IPv6 on our content delivery networks (CDNs), and share some key results of our performance analysis. —Erin Atkinson and Bhaskar Bhowmik @LinkedIn

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Responding to Readers: How are these thing discovered?

A while back I posted on section 10 routing loops; Daniel responded to the post with this comment:

I am curious how these things are discovered. You said that this is a contrived example, but I assume researchers have some sort of methodology to discover issues like this. I am sure some things have been found through operational mishap, but is there some “standardized” way of testing graph logic for the possibility of loops? I trust this is much easier to do today than even a decade ago.

You would think there would be some organized way to discover these kinds of routing loops, something every researcher and/or protocol designer might follow. The reality is far different—there is no systematic way that I know of to find this sort of problem. What happens, in real life, is that people with a lot of experience at the intersection of protocol design, the bounds of different ways of finding loop free paths (solving the loop free path problem), and a lot of experience in deploying and operating a network using these protocols, will figure these things out because they know enough about the solution space to look for them in the first Continue reading

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Worth Reading: The Architecture of RIPE ATLAS

It has been fun figuring out how to build [RIPE ATLAS] over the last seven years. Although there are other measurement networks out there besides RIPE Atlas, the unique features for each of these mean that there’s no single best practice on how to build one … —Robert Kisteleki @APNIC

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Worth Reading: Spotlight on Tetration

My first impression: Tetration is clearly evolving and improving. It may be just me, but I think I heard more emphasis on agents and third-party sources, and less on Nexus 9K hardware. That makes sense in terms of not holding up purchase until hardware refresh time — something that previously may have deferred some/many ACI and Tetration buying decisions. Admittedly, hardware-based approaches have fewer touch points. —Pete Welcher @Netcraftsmen

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Responding to Readers: Automated Design?

Deepak responded to my video on network commodization with a question:

What’s your thoughts on how Network Design itself can be Automated and validated. Also from Intent based Networking at some stage Network should re-look into itself and adjust to meet design goals or best practices or alternatively suggest the design itself in green field situation for example. APSTRA seems to be moving into this direction.

The answer to this question, as always, is—how many balloons fit in a bag? I think it depends on what you mean when you use the term design. If we are talking about the overlay, or traffic engineering, or even quality of service, I think we will see a rising trend towards using machine learning in network environments to help solve those problems. I am not convinced machine learning can solve these problems, in the sense of leaving humans out of the loop, but humans could set the parameters up, let the neural network learn the flows, and then let the machine adjust things over time. I tend to think this kind of work will be pretty narrow for a long time to come.

There will be stumbling blocks here that need to be Continue reading

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Worth Reading: Can routing be oversimplified?

Hiding the networking infrastructure from the end user is nothing new. It’s a trick that has been used for years to allow infrastructures to be tuned and configured in such a way as to deliver maximum performance without letting anyone tinker with the secret sauce under the hood. —The Networking Nerd

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Worth Reading: Antivirus as spyware

What does an antivirus program do? It scans every file in your device looking for *signatures*, and then uploads those files which match the signatures for further analysis by the antivirus provider. So hacking antivirus involves 2 steps: produce signatures for files you want to steal, and then exfiltrate those files. The hard work of scanning for those files is already automated by the antivirus program! —Henry Baker @RISKS

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History of Networking: The history of DNS with Paul Mockapetris

 
In this recording, Jordan, Donald, and I talk to Paul Mockapetris, who took on the problem of naming in the original Internet. Back when routers were called fuzzballs, and the only way to get to a destination was by referencing a host file…

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Worth Reading: Firewall Policies

Every firewall policy starts simple and with the best of intentions, only to grow and change until it no longer resembles its former self. Firewall management is so vital that it is the first requirement in the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard. Even if you are not required to be audited against PCI or similar standards, we can borrow some aspects to increase the security of any network. —Jamie Gillespie @APNIC

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Weekend Reads 011918: IoT, Cyberthreat Thinking, and Techlash

Throughout 2016 and 2017, attacks from massive botnets made up entirely of hacked IoT devices had many experts warning of a dire outlook for Internet security. But the future of IoT doesn’t have to be so bleak. Here’s a primer on minimizing the chances that your IoT things become a security liability for you or for the Internet at large. —Krebs on Security

The cybercrime and cyber terrorism raging today are the most visible symptoms of a more pervasive problem concerning cyber security. How to establish a fair and just governance regime in cyberspace and establish international rules spark a storm of controversy. The controversy reflects the competing interests and demands of three distinct cyberspace actors: the state, the citizen, and the international community. By focusing only on one’s own interests, each actor ignores the interests of the other two, resulting in the current situation in which each sticks to its own argument and refuses to reconcile. —Hao Yeli

Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein has given talks where he proposes that tech companies decrease their communications and device security for the benefit of the FBI. In a recent talk, his idea is that tech companies just save a copy of the Continue reading

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Sunset over the Marsh

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Worth Reading: The future of mobile network operators

Mobile networks are moving in that same direction — that is, the largest part of their network will be a utility, with currently two, three or four mobile infrastructure providers per country and little economic sense for overbuilding the basic infrastructure, the industry is facing serious problems. —Paul Budde @CircleID

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Worth Reading: The Future for Mobile Operators

The telecommunication industry is continuing to resist structural changes, but the reality is that if they don’t transform, technology will do it for them. We have seen the fixed telecom operators slowly being pushed back into the infrastructure utility market. —Paul Budde @CicleID

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On the ‘net: BGP Traffic Engineering at the Network Collective

Nick Russo and I stopped by the Network Collective last week to talk about BGP traffic engineering—and in the process I confused BGP deterministic MED and always compare MED. I’ve embedded the video below.