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Category Archives for "Networking"

New RFC 8360 – RPKI Validation Reconsidered – Offers Alternative Validation Procedures to Improve Routing Security

RFC 8360, Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) Validation Reconsidered, is now published in the RFC libraries.

What is RPKI?

Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) aims to improve the security of the Internet routing system, specifically the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), by establishing a hierarchy of trust for BGP routes. Today, most organizations simply trust that routing updates they get are sent by authorized senders. This is how bad actors and misconfigurations can cause massive routing issues. With RPKI, the receiving organization can verify that the sending organization is authorized to send the routing update.

RPKI works by issuing X.509-based resource certificates to holders of IP addresses and AS numbers to prove assignment of these resources. These certificates are issued to Local Internet Registries (LIRs) by one of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) who allocate and assign these resources in their service regions.

What Does This RFC Do?

In the IETF, participants have been discussing issues that may arise when resources move across registries. The problem happens when a subordinate certificate “over-claims” resources compared to its parent. According to the standard validation procedure specified in RFC 6487, the whole branch beneath would be invalidated. The closer to Continue reading

Cloudflare Argo Tunnel with Rust+Raspberry Pi

Cloudflare Argo Tunnel with Rust+Raspberry Pi

Yesterday Cloudflare launched Argo Tunnel. In the words of the product team:

Argo Tunnel exposes applications running on your local web server, on any network with an Internet connection, without adding DNS records or configuring a firewall or router. It just works.

Once I grokked this, the first thing that came to mind was that I could actually use one of my Raspberry Pi's sitting around to serve a website, without:

  • A flaky DDNS running on my router
  • Exposing my home network to the world
  • A cloud VM

Ooooh... so exciting.

The Rig

I'll assume you already have a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian on it.

Cloudflare Argo Tunnel with Rust+Raspberry Pi

Plug the Pi into your router. It should now have an IP address. Look that up in your router’s admin UI:

Cloudflare Argo Tunnel with Rust+Raspberry Pi

OK, that's promising. Let's connect to that IP using the default pi/raspberry credentials:

$ ssh 192.168.8.26 -l pi
[email protected]'s password: 

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Stuffing the Camel into the Bikeshed

I’m sure that there are folk who believe that bodies like the IETF can exercise just the right level of restraint and process management to keep excessive levels of both camelling and bikeshedding out of the IETF and its Working Groups activities. Speaking personally, I just can’t see that happening.

Juniper JET & Golang

Network programmability and network automation go hand-in-hand (pun intended) and I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to play with the Juniper IDL (.proto) files to build a JET (Juniper Extension Toolkit) application. Thanks to Marcel Wiget’s efforts, the opening I’ve been waiting for came along!

So what is JET?

JET is a couple of things:

  • Ability to run Python, C and C++ applications onboard both veriexec and non-veriexec enabled Junos
  • Ability to create an off-box application using GRPC and MQTT

JET allows you to program Junos out of the normal NETCONF, CLI, SNMP and ephemeral DB methods that we’re all fairly used to. The other thing is, it’s quick. Like really quick. With GRPC and MQTT, we can program a network element using mechanisms the software world is used to. I’ve been saying for a long time our data is no longer our own and JET allows us to bridge organisational worlds in multiple ways. Pretty cool.

So what did you do?

Not having a huge amount of time for this, I opted for off-box and took Marcel’s code as the base for how to use the APIs exposed via GRPC.

The application uses the “bgp_route_service” JET API Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Bringing your Internet of Things infrastructure into the digital age

When Campofrio Food Group’s 17-year-old factory in Burgos, Spain, famously burned to the ground, the multinational meat processor turned tragedy into opportunity. With an eye on digital transformation, Campofrio rebuilt the facility as a connected factory, powered by the Internet of Things (IoT). This allowed the state-of-the-art, greenfield meat packing plant to automate processes and provide real-time data on materials, equipment and workers to uncover new business value.Such “blank canvas” opportunities to bring a factory into the digital age from the ground up don’t happen very often. Most IoT projects are implemented in existing, brownfield environments with traditional legacy systems, requiring an incremental approach. The goal of these gradual integrations has been to optimize or automate processes, gain some efficiencies, and move onto the next low-hanging fruit. But, this approach will not work if businesses want to capture IoT’s true transformational value: the creation of new business models, new revenue streams, new products and new markets.To read this article in full, please click here