Zscaler Study Finds Companies are Rushing Towards Generative AI Without Considering the Risks
The research underlines the urgency for businesses to balance the potential of gen AI tools with effective security strategies to ensure safe usage of this emerging technology.2024, the year of elections
2024 is a year of elections, with more than 70 elections scheduled in 40 countries around the world. One of the key pillars of democracy is trust. To that end, ensuring that the Internet is trusted, secure, reliable, and accessible for the public and those working in the election space is critical to any free and fair election.
Cloudflare has considerable experience in gearing up for elections and identifying how our cyber security tools can be used to help vulnerable groups in the election space. In December 2022, we expanded our product set to include Zero Trust products to assist these groups against new and emerging threats. Over the last few years, we’ve reported on our work in protecting a range of election entities and as we prepare for the 2024 elections, we want to provide insight into attack trends we’ve seen against these groups to understand what to expect in the next year.
For this blog post, we identified cyber attack trends for a variety of groups in the elections space based in the United States, as many of our Cloudflare Impact projects provide services to these groups. These include U.S. state and local government websites protected under Continue reading
VXLAN/EVPN Layer-3 Handoff (L3Out) on Arista EOS
A while ago, I published a blog post describing how to establish a LAN/WAN L3 boundary in VXLAN/EVPN networks using Cisco NX-OS. At that time, I promised similar information for Arista EOS. Here it is, coming straight from Massimo Magnani. The useful part of what follows is his; all errors were introduced during my editing process.
In the cases I have dealt with so far, implementing the LAN-WAN boundary has the main benefit of limiting the churn blast radius to the local domain, trying to impact the remote ones as little as possible. To achieve that, we decided to go for a hierarchical solution where you create two domains, local (default) and remote, and maintain them as separate as possible.
VXLAN/EVPN Layer-3 Handoff (L3Out) on Arista EOS
A while ago, I published a blog post describing how to establish a LAN/WAN L3 boundary in VXLAN/EVPN networks using Cisco NX-OS. At that time, I promised similar information for Arista EOS. Here it is, coming straight from Massimo Magnani. The useful part of what follows is his; all errors were introduced during my editing process.
In the cases I have dealt with so far, implementing the LAN-WAN boundary has the main benefit of limiting the churn blast radius to the local domain, trying to impact the remote ones as little as possible. To achieve that, we decided to go for a hierarchical solution where you create two domains, local (default) and remote, and maintain them as separate as possible.
Weekend Reads 111923
Bad queries tend to propagate to the root zone due to the hierarchical nature of DNS, so studying traffic at a root server can provide key insights into overall network usage.
This blog covers an interesting case of suspected abuse in a gTLD registry between February and April 2023.
Gartner has raised the specter of departments outside of tech running their own IT Continue reading
AX.25 and 9600bps G3RUH decoding
I’ve been coding more on my rust SDR framework, and want to improve my ability to send/receive data packets efficiently and reliably.
There are two main ways I use learn to do this better: designing a new protocol, and making the best implementation possible for an existing one. This post is about refining the latter.
AX.25 and APRS
First a detour, or background.
AX.25 is the standard amateur radio data protocol. It’s mostly an OSI layer 2-4 protocol, mashing the layers together into one. Contrast this with IP, which just encapsulates the next layer.
Layer 3 (IP stack equivalent: IP itself) consists of the ability to
add, in addition to source and destination, a variable number of
intermediate repeaters. This allows limited source routing. In APRS
the repeaters are usually not named, but instead uses “virtual” hops
like WIDE1-1.
Layer 4 (IP stack equivalent: TCP and UDP) allows both connected and disconnected communication channels. In my experience connected AX.25 works better over slow simplex radio than TCP. If TCP was ever optimized for high delay low bandwidth, it’s not anymore.
For the physical layer, there are three main “modems”:
-
300 baud bell 103, used Continue reading
SDR transmit and clean signals
If you have a transmit capable SDR, you may have heard that you need to filter its output, before transmitting to the world. Certainly before amplifying the signal.
I have a TinySA Ultra spectrum analyzer, and will here show you some screenshots about just how true that is.
I tested this with my USRP B200, transmitting a pure carrier around 145MHz and 435MHz.
Oh, and a word of caution: If you want to replicate this, make sure to add an inline attenuator, to not damage your spectrum analyzer. I had a cheap 40dB one, but the values in the graphs have been adjusted to show the real signal strength, as if I hadn’t.
tl;dr
- Harmonics can be almost as strong as the fundamental. You need to filter these.
- Transmitting at maximum output gain may cause lots of unwanted signals right around your fundamental. You cannot filter these. You need to not generate them.
Harmonics
Reducing the output gain did not meaningfully fix the problem. The best I saw from using half output gain was to make the strongest harmonic 9dB less than the fundamental. That’s way too strong.
I added a cheap band pass filter (FBP-144), which made Continue reading
HN710: The Future Of Networking With Brad Casemore – Part 2
Analyst Brad Casemore offers his takes on the rise of zero trust, the influence of geopolitics on IT, what's driving the need for visibility and observability on prem and in the cloud, and whether 5G will ever live up to the hype.
The post HN710: The Future Of Networking With Brad Casemore – Part 2 appeared first on Packet Pushers.
HN710: The Future Of Networking With Brad Casemore – Part 2
We continue our Future of Networking series with part two of our conversation with Brad Casemore. Now retired, Brad has participated in the industry as both a technologist and IDC analyst. In this episode we look at the rise of zero trust and what it means for campus networking. We discuss how geopolitics influences IT... Read more »SC23 Over 6 Terabits per Second of WAN Traffic
Top US Gov’t CISO Details Zero-Trust Strategy Race
After an executive order mandated that US federal agencies adopt a zero-trust security strategy by 2024, security leaders had to spring to action quickly.How to execute an object file: Part 4, AArch64 edition
Translating source code written in a high-level programming language into an executable binary typically involves a series of steps, namely compiling and assembling the code into object files, and then linking those object files into the final executable. However, there are certain scenarios where it can be useful to apply an alternate approach that involves executing object files directly, bypassing the linker. For example, we might use it for malware analysis or when part of the code requires an incompatible compiler. We’ll be focusing on the latter scenario: when one of our libraries needed to be compiled differently from the rest of the code. Learning how to execute an object file directly will give you a much better sense of how code is compiled and linked together.
To demonstrate how this was done, we have previously published a series of posts on executing an object file:
- How to execute an object file: Part 1
- How to execute an object file: Part 2
- How to execute an object file: Part 3
The initial posts are dedicated to the x86 architecture. Since then the fleet of our working machines has expanded to include a large and growing number of ARM CPUs. This Continue reading
Video: Outages Caused by Bugs in BGP Implementations
The previous BGP-related videos described how fat fingers and malicious actors cause Internet outages.
Today, we’ll focus on the impact of bugs in BGP implementations, from malformed AS paths to mishandled transitive attributes. The examples in the video are a few years old, but you can see similar things in the wild in 2023.
You need at least free ipSpace.net subscription to watch videos in this webinar.
Video: Outages Caused by Bugs in BGP Implementations
The previous BGP-related videos described how fat fingers and malicious actors cause Internet outages.
Today, we’ll focus on the impact of bugs in BGP implementations, from malformed AS paths to mishandled transitive attributes. The examples in the video are a few years old, but you can see similar things in the wild in 2023.
You need at least free ipSpace.net subscription to watch videos in this webinar.
KU041: Running Kubernetes On Nomad
In this episode, Michael, Kristina, and Adriana Villela discuss the challenges and benefits of running Kubernetes on Nomad. Adriana shares her experience of using Nomad in a data center, highlighting its simplicity and ease of deployment compared to Kubernetes. The speakers also discuss the differences between the two platforms, the concept of vendor lock-in, and […]
The post KU041: Running Kubernetes On Nomad appeared first on Packet Pushers.
KU041: Running Kubernetes On Nomad
In this episode, Michael, Kristina, and Adriana Villela discuss the challenges and benefits of running Kubernetes on Nomad. Adriana shares her experience of using Nomad in a data center, highlighting its simplicity and ease of deployment compared to Kubernetes. The speakers also discuss the differences between the two platforms, the concept of vendor lock-in, and... Read more »SC23 Data Transfer Node TCP Metrics
The dashboard displays data gathered from open source Host sFlow agents installed on Data Transfer Nodes (DTNs) run by the Caltech High Energy Physics Department and used for handling transfer of large scientific data sets (for example, accessing experiment data from the CERN particle accelerator). Network performance monitoring describes how the Host sFlow agents augment standard sFlow telemetry with measurements that the Linux kernel maintains as part of the normal operation of the TCP protocol stack.
The dashboard shows 5 large flows (greater than 50 Gigabits per Second). For each large flow being tracked, additional TCP performance metrics are displayed:
- RTT The round trip time observed between DTNs
- RTT Wait The amount of time that data waits on sender before it can be sent.
- RTT Sdev The standard deviation on observed RTT. This variation is a measure of jitter.
- Avg. Packet Size The average packet size used to send data.
- Packets in Flight The number of unacknowledged packets.
See Defining Flows for full range of Continue reading
Hedge 203: Terry Slattery on Network Automation
Terry Slattery joins Tom and Russ to continue the conversation on network automation—and why networks are not as automated as they should be. This is part one of a two-part series; the second part will be published in two weeks as Hedge episode 204.