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Encryption Isn’t Perfect, That’s Why Choices Are Important

Encryption is a critical building block for online trust, but it’s never perfect. Any encryption you use is the product of many steps. Encryption methods have to be defined; protocols for implementation have to be specified; and then the protocols have to be implemented. Each step is handled by different people and potentially introduces vulnerabilities along the way. Even with the best lock design in the world, if someone builds the lock with variations in the design (either intentionally or accidentally), it might be easily picked.

When you own a broken lock, you have it fixed or use a different one – encryption is no different.

Yesterday (14 May 2018), the Internet security community was alerted to newly discovered vulnerabilities in the secure email ecosystem, dubbed “EFAIL”. EFAIL can make the content of emails encrypted with PGP and S/MIME readable to an attacker. While there are some fixes users and companies can make to mitigate EFAIL, cases like this underscore the importance of choice when it comes to secure communications.

How does the EFAIL attack work?

EFAIL abuses a combination of vulnerabilities in the OpenPGP and S/MIME specifications and the way that many email clients render remote content in Continue reading

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BrandPost: Using “The 3 V’s of Automation” to Maximize Automation ROI

For traditional Communications Service Providers (CSPs), the barriers to applying automation are coming down faster than ever before due to the use of new technologies such as analytics and machine learning. So, what is different, and why is now the time to act?The three V’s of automationWithin most traditional Operations Support System (OSS) projects there is an established methodology for identifying the environments best suited for automation. People use different names for these network automation target areas, but I like to refer to them as The Three V’s. These are:WHITE PAPERTo read this article in full, please click here

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Worth Reading: Pay attention to performance

In some recent design situations, I’ve spent some time looking at routers and firewalls, looking for some fairly hefty performance characteristics. That’s where it became quite clear (if it wasn’t clear enough already), that router and firewall performance costs a lot more, compared to switches. As covered in the previous blog. —Pete Welcher @Netcraftsmen

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Hitachi, HPE and IBM enhance their SSD-based storage products

When three major vendors all make similar product announcements, you know things are cooking in that space. In this case, Hitachi Vantara, HP Enterprise, and IBM all made news around SSD-based storage, much of it related to de-duplication and other ways to get control over data creep.With users generating gigabytes of data every week, the solution for many enterprises has been to throw storage at it. That can get expensive, especially with SSD. SSD averages about 40 cents per gigabyte, while HDD storage averages about 5 cents per gigabyte.To get control over data sprawl, storage vendors are offering de-duplication, or in the case of Hitachi Vantara, better de-duplication with their new systems. We’ll run down the news alphabetically.To read this article in full, please click here

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Video: Accelerating Envoy with the Linux Kernel – Thomas Graf

Must watch to understand BPF in Linux

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Get a hands-on, inside look at the dark web | Salted Hash Ep 25

Reporting from RSA 2018, host Steve Ragan helps dispel the hype and confusion surrounding the dark web, as he talks with Alon Arvatz, co-founder at IntSights.

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When it comes to hyperconverged infrastructure, the hardware matters

At Nutanix's .NEXT user conference last week, the company certainly flexed its software muscles with a cornucopia of new products and a roadmap to becoming the next big enterprise platform vendor. To achieve this status, Nutanix has shifted to selling software and letting its customers run its stack on their preferred hardware platform.There is currently a wide range of hardware partners supporting Nutanix, including Lenovo, IBM, and HPE. However, the vendor that has done perhaps the best job at providing the widest range of options for Nutanix customers is Dell EMC.To read this article in full, please click here

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When it comes to hyperconverged infrastructure, the hardware matters

At Nutanix's .NEXT user conference last week, the company certainly flexed its software muscles with a cornucopia of new products and a roadmap to becoming the next big enterprise platform vendor. To achieve this status, Nutanix has shifted to selling software and letting its customers run its stack on their preferred hardware platform.There is currently a wide range of hardware partners supporting Nutanix, including Lenovo, IBM, and HPE. However, the vendor that has done perhaps the best job at providing the widest range of options for Nutanix customers is Dell EMC.To read this article in full, please click here

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5 Storage Administrator Survival Tips

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How to Size Routers and Firewalls

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Will Huawei become a pawn in a high-stakes U.S.-China technology war?

The Justice Department investigation into Huawei recalls a similar probe into whether Shenzhen rival ZTE broke U.S. sanctions by exporting devices containing American components to Iran. ZTE was found guilty last year not only of breaking the sanctions, which resulted in an $892 million fine, but of breaking the settlement deal’s terms by failing to punish those involved.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

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GPUs: Designed for gaming now crucial to HPC and AI

It’s rare to see a processor find great success outside of the area it was intended for, but that’s exactly what has happened to the graphics processing unit (GPU). A chip originally intended to speed up gaming graphics and nothing more now powers everything from Adobe Premier and databases to high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI).GPUs are now offered in servers from every major OEM plus off-brand vendors like Supermicro, but they aren’t doing graphics acceleration. That’s because the GPU is in essence a giant math co-processor, now being used to perform computation-intensive work ranging from 3D simulations to medical imaging to financial modelingTo read this article in full, please click here

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Will Huawei become a pawn in a high-stakes U.S.-China technology war?

The Justice Department investigation into Huawei recalls a similar probe into whether Shenzhen rival ZTE broke U.S. sanctions by exporting devices containing American components to Iran. ZTE was found guilty last year not only of breaking the sanctions, which resulted in an $892 million fine, but of breaking the settlement deal’s terms by failing to punish those involved.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

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Can AI help bridge the IT security skills gap? | Salted Hash Ep 27

Host Steve Ragan reports from the show floor at RSA 2018, taking with Oliver Tavakoli, CTO at Vectra Networks, and author of the Thinking Security blog on CSOonline.com, about the types of IT security work that can be off-loaded to artificial intelligence systems.

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Will Huawei become a pawn in a high-stakes U.S.-China technology war?

The Justice Department investigation into Huawei recalls a similar probe into whether Shenzhen rival ZTE broke U.S. sanctions by exporting devices containing American components to Iran. ZTE was found guilty last year not only of breaking the sanctions, which resulted in an $892 million fine, but of breaking the settlement deal’s terms by failing to punish those involved.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

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GPUs: Designed for gaming now crucial to HPC and AI

It’s rare to see a processor find great success outside of the area it was intended for, but that’s exactly what has happened to the graphics processing unit (GPU). A chip originally intended to speed up gaming graphics and nothing more now powers everything from Adobe Premier and databases to high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI).GPUs are now offered in servers from every major OEM plus off-brand vendors like Supermicro, but they aren’t doing graphics acceleration. That’s because the GPU is in essence a giant math co-processor, now being used to perform computation-intensive work ranging from 3D simulations to medical imaging to financial modelingTo read this article in full, please click here

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Is OSPF or IS-IS Good Enough for My Data Center?

Our good friend mr. Anonymous has too many buzzwords and opinions in his repertoire, at least based on this comment he left on my Using 4-byte AS Numbers with EVPN blog post:

But IGPs don't scale well (as you might have heard) except for RIFT and Openfabric. The others are trying to do ECMP based on BGP.

Should you be worried about OSPF or IS-IS scalability when building your data center fabric? Short answer: most probably not. Before diving into a lengthy explanation let's give our dear friend some homework.

Read more ...

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Don’t Reply To Everything

I recently came across a simple idea that is having a positive impact on productivity. That idea is to not reply to everything. While this can be applied to social media broadly, I’m focused on email management here.

For me, not replying is more difficult than it sounds. I am a personality type that doesn’t like loose ends. I like to meet other’s expectations, and have them think cuddly, happy thoughts about what a swell person I am. I know that when I send an email, I hope to get a response. Therefore, when I receive an e-mail, my natural inclination is to respond.

Now, I don’t feel I overly waste time on replying to email. I’ve improved my response technique over the years. I bring an e-mail thread to a conclusion as rapidly as possible by anticipating and proactively answering questions. That’s more time-consuming than a quick, lazy “back to you” response, but saves time in the long run.

However, an advance on the proactive reply is never replying at all. Not responding is the ultimate way to bring an email thread to a conclusion.

You’re So Rude

On the surface, ignoring inbox messages seems rude. However, Continue reading

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Don’t Reply To Everything

I recently came across a simple idea that is having a positive impact on productivity. That idea is to not reply to everything. While this can be applied to social media broadly, I’m focused on email management here.

For me, not replying is more difficult than it sounds. I am a personality type that doesn’t like loose ends. I like to meet other’s expectations, and have them think cuddly, happy thoughts about what a swell person I am. I know that when I send an email, I hope to get a response. Therefore, when I receive an e-mail, my natural inclination is to respond.

Now, I don’t feel I overly waste time on replying to email. I’ve improved my response technique over the years. I bring an e-mail thread to a conclusion as rapidly as possible by anticipating and proactively answering questions. That’s more time-consuming than a quick, lazy “back to you” response, but saves time in the long run.

However, an advance on the proactive reply is never replying at all. Not responding is the ultimate way to bring an email thread to a conclusion.

You’re So Rude

On the surface, ignoring inbox messages seems rude. However, Continue reading

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My Reaction To Arista Announcing Campus Networking

Arista sees an opportunity to enter the campus market with a core switch and a "more of what you have but better" strategy while Cisco tries to pull customers up-market with SD-Access.