Archive

Category Archives for "Networking"

IETF 101

I will be at IETF 101 in London in March. If you have never been to an IETF before and live in the London area, this is a great chance to come see how the standardization process works, and even get involved for the long term.

Wide area networks: What WANs are and where they’re headed

If it weren’t for wide-area networks it wouldn’t be possible to create unified networks for organizations with far-flung locations, to telecommute, or to do online anything. But WANs do exist and have for decades, constantly evolving to carry more and more traffic faster as demands increase and technology becomes more powerful.What is a WAN? A WAN is a network that uses various links – private lines, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), virtual private networks (VPNs), wireless (cellular), the Internet – to connect smaller metropolitan and campus networks in diverse locations into a single, distributed network. The sites they connect could be a few miles apart or halfway around the globe. In an enterprise, the purposes of a WAN could include connecting branch offices or even individual remote workers with headquarters or the data center, in order to share corporate resources and communications.To read this article in full, please click here

Wide-area networks: What WANs are and where they’re headed

If it weren’t for wide-area networks, it wouldn’t be possible to create unified networks for organizations with far-flung locations, to telecommute, or to do online anything. But WANs do exist and have for decades, constantly evolving to carry more and more traffic faster as demands increase and technology becomes more powerful.What is a WAN? A WAN is a network that uses various links – private lines, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), virtual private networks (VPNs), wireless (cellular), the Internet – to connect smaller metropolitan and campus networks in diverse locations into a single, distributed network. The sites they connect could be a few miles apart or halfway around the globe. In an enterprise, the purposes of a WAN could include connecting branch offices or even individual remote workers with headquarters or the data center, in order to share corporate resources and communications.To read this article in full, please click here

Wide-area networks: What WANs are and where they’re headed

If it weren’t for wide-area networks, it wouldn’t be possible to create unified networks for organizations with far-flung locations, to telecommute, or to do online anything. But WANs do exist and have for decades, constantly evolving to carry more and more traffic faster as demands increase and technology becomes more powerful.What is a WAN? A WAN is a network that uses various links – private lines, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), virtual private networks (VPNs), wireless (cellular), the Internet – to connect smaller metropolitan and campus networks in diverse locations into a single, distributed network. The sites they connect could be a few miles apart or halfway around the globe. In an enterprise, the purposes of a WAN could include connecting branch offices or even individual remote workers with headquarters or the data center, in order to share corporate resources and communications.To read this article in full, please click here

Deprecating SPDY

Deprecating SPDY

Democratizing the Internet and making new features available to all Cloudflare customers is a core part of what we do. We're proud to be early adopters and have a long record of adopting new standards early, such as HTTP/2, as well as features that are experimental or not yet final, like TLS 1.3 and SPDY.

Participating in the Internet democracy occasionally means that ideas and technologies that were once popular or ubiquitous on the net lose their utility as newer technologies emerge. SPDY is one such technology. Several years ago, Google drafted a proprietary and experimental new protocol called SPDY. SPDY offered many performance improvements over the aging HTTP/1.1 standard and these improvements resulted in significantly faster page load times for real-world websites. Stemming from its success, SPDY became the starting point for HTTP/2 and, when the new HTTP standard was finalized, the SPDY experiment came to an end where it gradually fell into disuse.

As a result, we're announcing our intention to deprecate the use of SPDY for connections made to Cloudflare's edge by February 21st, 2018.

Remembering 2012

Five and a half years ago, when the majority of the web was unencrypted and web developers Continue reading

VMware NSX for vSphere 6.4 Eases Operations, Improves Application Security with Context

Summary: Generally available today, VMware NSX for vSphere 6.4 raises the bar for application security and planning, and introduces context-aware micro-segmentation

For those working in security, thinking and talking about the cyber threats in the world is a constant, a necessary evil. So, for a moment, let’s summon a better time to our memory. Remember when breaches didn’t keep us up at night? The threat of a breach didn’t hang over our heads with an associated cost of millions of dollars and the privacy of our users. In fact, it did, but they weren’t frequent or public enough to cause the awakening that they do today. We put up a wall at the perimeter to keep the bad guys out, and prayed.

OK, back to modern times. Today, we know the story is much different, for better and for worse. Breaches are more prevalent, but our defenses are more sophisticated and more importantly, they’re continuously evolving (just like the breaches). One major piece of this newer defense picture is micro-segmentation. With micro-segmentation, security policies traditionally only enforced at the perimeter are now brought down to the application. Micro-segmentation has gained massive traction and entered the mainstream, with most cloud Continue reading

Connecting Nepal’s Earthquake Affected Communities with a Sustainable Model

Beyond the Net Journal

Nepal’s rural population remains largely disconnected from the Internet. The problem is further aggravated by the devastating 7.8 Richter scale earthquake and the subsequent aftershocks that have been shaking Nepal since April 2015 and that left nearly 9,000 people dead.

The Internet Society Nepal Chapter, in partnership with the NPO “Forum for Digital Equality“, led a successful project to reduce the digital divide by facilitating the establishment of three Community Learning Hubs. The project, supported by The Internet Society Beyond the Net Funding Programme, set up the centers in three Nepali districts that were badly affected by the earthquake: Dhading, Sindhupalchowk and Dolakha.

Each Hub is being visited 100/day by community members. More than 1500 people are now accessing the Internet for free. To ensure a sustainable model for the project, services like printing and scanning are charged. The raised revenue is used to pay for operator salaries, repair and maintenance services.

Goma Shrestha, community ITC operator, proudly explains, “We started “eSewa”, an online payment gateway. Villagers used to go to the market to recharge their mobile and cable service, but now we have facilities in our own community”.

The Continue reading

However improbable: The story of a processor bug

Processor problems have been in the news lately, due to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. But generally, engineers writing software assume that computer hardware operates in a reliable, well-understood fashion, and that any problems lie on the software side of the software-hardware divide. Modern processor chips routinely execute many billions of instructions in a second, so any erratic behaviour must be very hard to trigger, or it would quickly become obvious.

But sometimes that assumption of reliable processor hardware doesn’t hold. Last year at Cloudflare, we were affected by a bug in one of Intel’s processor models. Here’s the story of how we found we had a mysterious problem, and how we tracked down the cause.

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CC-BY-SA-3.0 image by Alterego

Prologue

Back in February 2017, Cloudflare disclosed a security problem which became known as Cloudbleed. The bug behind that incident lay in some code that ran on our servers to parse HTML. In certain cases involving invalid HTML, the parser would read data from a region of memory beyond the end of the buffer being parsed. The adjacent memory might contain other customers’ data, which would then be returned in the HTTP response, and the result was Cloudbleed.

But Continue reading