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Worth Reading: Who pays security costs?

Computer security costs money. It costs more to develop secure software, and there’s an ongoing maintenance cost to patch the remaining holes. Spending more time and money up front will likely result in lesser maintenance costs going forward, but too few companies do that. Besides, even very secure operating systems like Windows 10 and iOS have had security problems and hence require patching. (I just installed iOS 10.3.2 on my phone. It fixed about two dozen security holes.) So — who pays? —CircleID

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Reading List: WannaCry and Ransomware

A good bit has been written about the recent WannaCry outbreak over the last few weeks; rather than stringing the best out through Worth Reading posts, I have collected the three best posts on the topic here.

There are a number of takeaways and lessons to learn from the far-reaching attack that we witnessed. Let me tie those to voluntary cooperation and collaboration which together represent the foundation for the Internet’s development. The reason for making this connection is because they provide the way to get the global cyber threat under control. Not just to keep ourselves and our vital systems and services protected, but to reverse the erosion of trust in the Internet. —CircleID

Over the weekend a cyber attack known as “WannaCry” infected hundreds of computers all over the world with ransomware (malware which encrypts your data until you pay a ransom, usually in Bitcoin). The attack takes advantage of an exploit for Windows known as “EternalBlue” which was in the possession of NSA and, in mid April, was made public by a group known as “The Shadow Brokers.” Microsoft issued a patch for the vulnerability on March 14 for all supported versions of Windows (Vista and Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Embiggening Bite of GPUs

That is how CPUs got their name, after all. And perhaps this is a good time to remind everyone that systems used to be a collection of different kinds of compute, and that is why the central compute complex in an IBM System/360 was called the main frame. There were other frames, and in the case of RISC processors at IBM, the original 801 RISC chip that underlies half of its systems business today was commercialized as a controller for mainframe disk controllers. The Xeon processor that now dominates the datacenters of the world made a three-decade long jump off our desks. —The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: Key logger audio driver

The audio driver installed on some HP laptops includes a feature that could best be described as a keylogger, which records all the user’s keystrokes and saves the information to a local file, accessible to anyone or any third-party software or malware that knows where to look. Swiss cyber-security firm modzero discovered the keylogger on April 28 and made its findings public today. —Bleeping Computer

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Network Slices

There has been a lot of chatter recently in the 5G wireless world about network slices. A draft was recently published in the IETF on network slices—draft-gdmb-netslices-intro-and-ps-02. But what, precisely, is a network slice?

Perhaps it is better to begin with a concept most network engineers already know (and love)—a virtual topology. A virtual topology is a set of links, with some subset of connected devices (either virtual or real), that act as a subset of the network. Isn’t such a subset of the network a “slice” if you look at it from a different angle? To ask the question in a different way: how are network slices different from virtual network overlays?

To begin, consider the control plane. In the world of virtual topologies, there is generally one control plane that provides reachability, as well as sorting reachability into each virtual topology. For instance, BGP carries a route target and a route discriminator to indicate which virtual topology any particular destination belongs to. A network slice, by contrast, actually has multiple control planes—one for each slice. There will still be one “supervisor control plane,” of course, much like there is a hypervisor that manages the resources of each Continue reading

Worth Reading: Mapping with wifi

We think of Wi-Fi as primarily bathing our homes and offices in a comfy, invisible blanket of data and internet access, but just as a blanket can take on the shapes of the bodies it covers, the microwave radiation sent out from a hotspot can be used to generate a three-dimensional image of the surrounding environment and the things and people in it. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich have come up with a process that creates a holographic image of a space from the microwave radiation of a Wi-Fi signal bouncing off people and objects. The scientists say their method could be used in automated industrial settings, to track objects moving through a facility, for example. —New Atlas

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Worth Reading: Security debt

Just like organizations can build up technical debt, so too can they also build up something called “security debt,” if they don’t plan accordingly… In the past, security used to be ignored by pretty much everyone, except banks. But security is more critical than it has ever been because there are so many access points. We’ve entered the era of Internet of Things, where thieves can just hack your fridge to see that you’re not home.

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Worth Reading: Hype to reality

Looking back, even long term industry veterans can’t remember so many ‘earth shattering’, ‘ground breaking’ and ‘industry changing’ solutions hitting the market, in such a short timeframe. SDN will revolutionize the way we manage networks, shortly after (or before) NFV will change the way we build them. And all of this will make 5G the savior of bandwidth hungry users, service providers struggling to find feasible business cases, and lonely fridges looking for ‘peers’ to talk to. All, of course, based on openness and full vendor interoperability. Why would anybody want to crash this party? —ECI

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Worth Reading: Bartering for privacy

If data is the new currency then why isn’t exchanging data for use of a service a barter transaction? If a doctor exchanges medical services for chickens, for example, that is a taxable event at fair market value. It’s a barter arrangement. A free service that sells user data is similarly bartering the service for data, otherwise said service would not be offered. —High Scalability

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On the ‘net: A New Routing Stack Comes to Town

While Quagga has always been the mainstay of the open source routing world, but this “granddaddy of open source routing stacks” has always suffered from a shallowness of community participation, a lack of a solid legal framework, and—probably more than anything else—a lack of automated and regular integration testing. In fact, the lack of a widely supported, thoroughly tested, and strongly founded open source routing stack has hindered the disaggregation and white box worlds for a long while. —ECI

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Worth Reading: IoT devices will never be secure

The biggest problem with IoT security is that most devices are going to be relatively simple and inexpensive connected things. The bandwidth consumption of these devices should be kept to the minimum to save bandwidth. Yet at the same time, security is supposed to be a continuous process. This involves a party that is responsible for keeping an eye on the various security vulnerabilities that emerge from time to time, and another one to make sure that suitable patches are being prepared and applied on timely basis. —CircleID

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Troubleshooting: Half Split

The best models will support the second crucial skill required for troubleshooting: seeing the system as a set of problems to be solved. The problem/solution mindset is so critical in really understanding how networks really work, and hence how to troubleshoot them, that Ethan Banks and I are writing an entire book around this concept. The essential points are these—

  • Understand the set of problems being solved
  • Understand a wide theoretical set of solutions for this problem, including how each solution interacts with other problems and solutions, potential side effects of using each solution, and where the common faults lie in each solution
  • Understand this implementation

    • of this solution

Having this kind of information in your head will help you pull in detail where needed to fill in the models of each system; just as you cannot keep all four of the primary systems in your head at once, you also cannot effectively troubleshoot without a reservoir of more detailed knowledge about each system, or the ready ability to absorb more information about each system as needed. Having a problem/solution mindset also helps keep you focused in troubleshooting.
So you have built models of each system, and you have learned Continue reading

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