Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Author Archives: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Before Facebook, the Late Ward Christensen Booted Up the First Social Network

Back in the 70s, if you wanted to be online, you had to be a college student, researcher, or in the military to be on the internet. That was it. Joe or Jane User? Forget about it. Then, during a Chicago blizzard, a young computer scientist, online services such as CompuServe started as early as 1969. However, unlike the free BBSs, these services could cost as much as $30 an hour in 1970s dollars or $130 an hour in today’s money. XMODEM file transfer protocol in 1977. This innovative method broke binary files into packets, ensuring reliable delivery over unstable analog telephone lines. XMODEM became a cornerstone of early online file sharing and inspired numerous subsequent file transfer protocols. While considered inefficient by today’s standards, XMODEM established key concepts that are still used in file transfers. These include breaking data into packets for transmission, using checksums or CRCs for error detection, and implementing handshaking between sender and receiver. Thanks to XMODEM, people began sharing files with one another. This, in turn, helped create

Tetrate Enterprise Gateway for Envoy Graduates

Istio and Tetrate Enterprise Gateway for Envoy (TEG). This release provides businesses with a modern and secure alternative to traditional Envoy Gateway version 1.0. TEG extends its features by including cross-cluster service discovery and load balancing, OpenID Connect (OIDC), OAuth2, Web Application Firewall (WAF), and rate limiting out of the box along with Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 compliance. A standout feature of the Envoy Gateway, and by extension TEG, is its native support for the newly introduced

Netflix Releases bpftop: An eBPF-Based Application Monitor

Extended Berkeley Packet Filter, eBPF to its friends, enables you to run sandboxed programs in a privileged context in the Linux kernel. Netflix has unveiled bpftop, a new open source command-line tool designed to enhance the performance optimization and monitoring of eBPF applications. As the streaming giant continues integrating eBPF technology into its infrastructure, ensuring these applications operate efficiently has become a top priority.

Traefik Proxy v3 Adds WebAssembly and Kubernetes Gateway API Support

A leading open source reverse proxy and load balancer, Emile Vauge, Traefik’s creator, said previously in The New Stack, “Traditional reverse proxies were not well-suited for these dynamic environments.” Now, the Traefik Labs, the project’s parent company, introduced the first Release Candidate of Traefik Proxy v3. This new version now supports WebAssembly (Wasm), OpenTelemetry, and Kubernetes Gateway API. A Game-Changer for WebAssembly? WebAssembly support inclusion may prove a game-changer. Besides offering high-performance, language-agnostic capabilities for serverless and containerized applications, Traefik’s support provides Wasm with a larger potential market. “This is a major step towards a low friction extensibility story for Traefik as it brings broader plugins into its growing ecosystem while providing a great developer experience. with plugins that can be written in different languages and compiled directly into Wasm,” said Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP), will provide users with improved visibility into their applications. Since the Prometheus and Jesse Haka, a cloud architect at

Farewell to the Internet’s Master Timekeeper: David Mills

Photo by David Woolley, cc0 Dr. David L. Mills, the visionary behind the Network Time Protocol (NTP) that synchronizes time across billions of devices globally, died at age 85 on Jan. 17, 2024. The Chicago song goes, “Network Time Protocol (NTP) was, and is, essential for running the internet. As Cerf wrote, announcing the news of his passing, “He was such NTP. We don’t think about how hard it is to synchronize time around the world to within milliseconds. But everything, and I mean everything, depends on NTP’s accuracy. It’s not just the internet, it’s financial markets, power grids, GPS, cryptography, and far, far more.

The Terrapin Attack: A New Threat to SSH Integrity

This new vulnerability, Terrapin, breaks the integrity of SSH’s secure channel. Yes, that’s just as bad as it sounds. Anyone who does anything on the cloud or programming uses Secure Shell (SSH). So any vulnerability is bad news. Guess what? I’ve got some bad news. Researchers at Ruhr University have found a  significant vulnerability in the SSH cryptographic network protocol, which they’ve labeled CVE-2023-48795: General Protocol Flaw; CVE-2023-46446: Rogue Session Attack in AsyncSSH poses a serious threat to internet security. Terrapin enables attackers to compromise the integrity of SSH connections, which are widely used for secure access to network services. The Terrapin attack targets the SSH protocol by manipulating prefix sequence numbers during the handshake process. This manipulation enables attackers to remove messages sent by the client or server at the beginning of the secure channel without detection. The attack can lead to using less secure client authentication algorithms and deactivation-specific countermeasures against keystroke timing attacks in OpenSSH 9.5. Terrapin is a Man-in-the-Middle The good news — yes, there is good news — is that while the Terrapin attack Continue reading

Red Hat Launches OpenStack Platform 17.1 with Enhanced Security

VANCOUVER — At OpenStack Platform 17.1. This release is the product of the company’s ongoing commitment to support telecoms as they build their next-generation 5G network infrastructures. In addition to bridging existing 4G technologies with emerging 5G networks, the platform enables advanced use cases like Red Hat OpenShift, the company’s

Azure Went Dark

And down went all Microsoft 365 services around the world. One popular argument against putting your business trust in the cloud is that if your hyper-cloud provider goes down, so does your business. Well, on the early U.S. East coast morning, it happened. Microsoft Azure went down and along with it went Microsoft 365, Exchange Online, Outlook, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, GitHub, Microsoft Authenticator, and Teams. In short, pretty much everything running on Azure went boom. issues impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services.” Of course, by that time, users were already screaming. As one Reddit user on the sysadmin subreddit, wrote, “rolled back a network change that we believe is causing impact. We’re monitoring the service as the rollback takes effect.” By 9:31 a.m., Microsoft said the disaster was over. “We’ve confirmed that

OpenSSL Heap Memory Corruption Vulnerability Fixed

Ever since CVE-2022-2274, didn’t reach Heartbleed levels of ick, but it was more than bad enough. What happened was that the OpenSSL 3.0.4 release introduced a serious RSA bug in X86-64 CPUs supporting the AVX512 IFMA instructions. This set of CPU single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) instructions for floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) was introduced in 2018. You’ll find it in pretty much every serious Intel processor, from Skylake to AMD’s forthcoming Zen 4. In other words, it’s probably in every server you’re currently running. Is that great news or what? Memory Corruption The problem is that RSA 2048-bit private key implementations fail on this chip architecture. Adding insult to injury, memory corruption results during the computation. The last straw? An attacker can use this memory corruption to trigger a remote code execution (RCE) on the machine. Exploiting it might not be easy, but it is doable. And, even if an attack isn’t that reliable, if it’s used to hit a server that constantly respawns, say a web server, it Continue reading

There’s a Nasty Security Hole in the Apache Webserver

Here a security hole, there a security hole, everywhere a security hole. One of the latest is an obnoxious one labeled Apache HTTP Server‘s CVE-2022-23943, an Apache memory corruption vulnerability in mod_sed, was uncovered. This one was an out-of-bounds Write vulnerability that enabled attackers to overwrite heap memory. When you say, “overwrite heap memory,” you know it’s bad news. This impacted the Apache HTTP Server 2.4 version 2.4.52 and earlier versions. New Problems It was quickly fixed. But, JFrog Security Research team’s Security Research Tech Lead, worried that while the

Multifactor Authentication Is Being Targeted by Hackers

It was only a matter of time. While multifactor authentication (MFA) makes logging into systems safer, it doesn’t make it “safe.” As well-known hacker KnownBe4, showed in 2018 it’s easy to Proofpoint has found transparent reverse proxy. Typically transparent reverse proxies, such as the open source man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks to steal credentials and session cookies. Why go to this trouble? Because, as an MFA company 78% of users now use MFA, compared to just 28% in 2017. That’s good news, but it’s also given cybercrooks the incentive they needed to target MFA. A Range of Kits To make it easy for wannabe hackers. Proofpoint found today’s phishing kits range from “simple open-source kits with human-readable code and no-frills functionality Continue reading

Prossimo: Making the Internet Memory Safe

The Let’s Encrypt certificate authority, but it has also turned its hand to fixing memory problems. It sponsors, via Google, so Rust in Linux in no small part to fix its built-in C memory problems. And, it also has a whole department, Rustls, a safer memory-safe code. Memory-safe programs are written in languages that avoid the usual use after free problems. C, C++, and Assembly, for all their speed, make it all too easy to make these kinds of mistakes. Languages such as Rust, Go, and C#, however, Continue reading

Dynamic DNS Security Blues

Whenever you run into a network problem, the wise network admin or sysadmin always remembers “It’s always Black Hat USA 2021 security conference Ami Luttwak and head of research simple loophole that allowed them to intercept dynamic DNS (DDNS) traffic going through managed DNS providers like Amazon and Google. And, yes, that includes the DDNS you’re using on your cloud. And, if you think that’s bad, just wait until you see just how trivial this attack is. Our intrepid researchers found that “simply registering certain ‘special’ domains, specifically the name of the name server itself, has unexpected consequences on all other customers using the name server.

What the Heck Happened to the Internet? Fastly’s Hard Fall and Quick Recovery

Well, wasn’t that fun? On June 8, 2021, many internet users went to their usual sites such as Amazon, Reddit, CNN, or the New York Times and found nothing but an “Error 503 service unavailable” and an ominous “connection failure” note. So, what happened? The Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) other features became important. In particular, everyone started demanding faster performance and lower latency. The solution? CDNs. These companies, which besides Fastly include market-leader Cloudflare, all use the same basic techniques to speed up the net. They take the data from popular sites and place it in distributed caches in points of presence (PoP) close to consumers. If that sounds familiar to you even if you’re a cloud native developer and not a network administrator there’s a good reason. CDNs were one of the first business models Continue reading

Why Open Source Project Maintainers are Reluctant to use Digital Signatures, Two-Factor Authentication

We all agree that open source development methods help create better code. The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” which explained how the methodology of openness worked in Fetchmail project. But, that’s a general rule. Open source can still be abused by unscrupulous developers. So, why don’t we make sure when a programmer attempts to merge code into a program that they’re really who they say they are, by using two-factor authentication (2FA) or a digital signature? Good question. You might not think this is a real problem. Alas, it is. For example, in 2019 CursedGrabber malware was successfully Linux Foundation’s 2020 FOSS Contributor Survey, when developers were asked if the open source projects Continue reading

Open Policy Agent for the Enterprise: Styra’s Declarative Authorization Service

Open Policy Agent (OPA, pronounced “oh-pa”) for cloud native environments was created, and policy enforcement in code became much more practical. Now, its developers, under their company, new three-tier product offering for Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS). Before diving into DAS, though, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page with OPA and policies in general. OPA is an open source, general-purpose policy engine that unifies policy enforcement across the stack. You write these policies in its high-level declarative language Datalog query language. With Rego, you can specify policy as code and create simple APIs to offload policy decision-making from your software. You can then use OPA to enforce policies in microservices, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, API gateways, and more. And, what’s a policy engine you ask?

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