HW034: Fixing Your Indoor Cellular Coverage
In this episode of the Heavy Wireless podcast, we talk with Howard Buzick from American Bandwidth about the evolution and current state of wireless connections, particularly in guest network environments. We explore advancements in Wi-Fi technologies, the workings of Passpoint (formerly Hotspot 2.0), and the differences between Passpoint and Open Roaming. Howard explains how American... Read more »PP027: How Wi-Fi Positioning Systems Enable Mass Surveillance
Smartphones use Wi-Fi based Positioning Systems (WPSes) to collect data about nearby Wi-Fi access points and other wireless devices to help determine the phones’ geographic location. Researchers at the University of Maryland show how WPSes from Apple and Google can be used for mass surveillance of access points and, potentially, owners and users of those... Read more »NIST’s first post-quantum standards
On August 13th, 2024, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published the first three cryptographic standards designed to resist an attack from quantum computers: ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA. This announcement marks a significant milestone for ensuring that today’s communications remain secure in a future world where large-scale quantum computers are a reality.
In this blog post, we briefly discuss the significance of NIST’s recent announcement, how we expect the ecosystem to evolve given these new standards, and the next steps we are taking. For a deeper dive, see our March 2024 blog post.
Why are quantum computers a threat?
Cryptography is a fundamental aspect of modern technology, securing everything from online communications to financial transactions. For instance, when visiting this blog, your web browser used cryptography to establish a secure communication channel to Cloudflare’s server to ensure that you’re really talking to Cloudflare (and not an impersonator), and that the conversation remains private from eavesdroppers.
Much of the cryptography in widespread use today is based on mathematical puzzles (like factoring very large numbers) which are computationally out of reach for classical (non-quantum) computers. We could likely continue to use traditional cryptography for decades to Continue reading
netlab 1.9.0: Routing Policies, Default Routes, Route Redistribution
netlab release 1.9.0 brings tons of new routing features:
- Generic Routing Configuration Module implements routing policies (route maps), prefix filters, AS-path filters, and BGP community filters.
- Default route origination in OSPFv2 and OSPFv3
- Route import (redistribution) into OSPFv2, OSPFv3, and BGP.
- Named prefixes
Other new goodies include:
Summer 2024 weather report: Cloudflare with a chance of Intern-ets
During the summer of 2024, Cloudflare welcomed approximately 60 Intern-ets from all around the globe on a mission to #HelpBuildABetterInternet. Over the course of their internships, our wonderful interns tackled real-world challenges from different teams all over the company and contributed to cutting-edge projects. As returning interns, we – Shaheen, Aaron, and Jada – would like to show off the great work our cohort has done and experiences we’ve had throughout our time here.
Austin Interns after volunteering at the Central Texas Food Bank.
Putting the SHIP in internSHIP
Cloudflare interns take pride in driving high-impact initiatives, playing a vital role in advancing Cloudflare's mission. With our diverse roles and projects this summer, we'd love to highlight some of the exciting work we've been involved in:
Rahul, a Software Engineer intern, built a system to autograde intern application assignments for future students looking to join Cloudflare. It was built entirely on the Cloudflare Developer Platform, using Cloudflare Access, Browser Rendering, D1, Durable Objects, R2, and Workers!
Jessica, a Software Engineer intern, created a new threads api for the Workers AI team that automatically recalls past messages when running inference, helping developers to Continue reading
NB491: Cisco Revenues Drop 10% in Q4; Texas Instruments Get $1.6 Billion for Chip Factories
Take a Network Break! Hackers may have stolen millions of US Social Security numbers, HPE acquires a multi-cloud management company, and Cisco announces plans to lay off 7% of its employees. Pure Storage joins industry efforts to make Ethernet suitable for AI workloads by signing on to the Ultra Ethernet Consortium, Texas Instruments will add... Read more »Dropped packet metrics with Prometheus and Grafana
Flow metrics with Prometheus and Grafana describes how define flow metrics and create dashboards to trend the flow metrics over time. This article describes how the same setup can be used to define and trend metrics based on dropped packet notifications.
- job_name: sflow-rt-drops
metrics_path: /app/prometheus/scripts/export.js/flows/ALL/txt
static_configs:
- targets: ['sflow-rt:8008']
params:
metric: ['dropped_packets']
key:
- 'node:inputifindex'
- 'ifname:inputifindex'
- 'reason'
- 'stack'
- 'macsource'
- 'macdestination'
- 'null:vlan:untagged'
- 'null:[or:ipsource:ip6source]:none'
- 'null:[or:ipdestination:ip6destination]:none'
- 'null:[or:icmptype:icmp6type:ipprotocol:ip6nexthdr]:none'
label:
- 'switch'
- 'port'
- 'reason'
- 'stack'
- 'macsource'
- 'macdestination'
- 'vlan'
- 'src'
- 'dst'
- 'protocol'
value: ['frames']
dropped: ['true']
maxFlows: ['20']
minValue: ['0.001']
The Prometheus scrape configuration above is used to Continue reading
Summer 2024 weather report: Cloudflare with a chance of Intern-ets
During the summer of 2024, Cloudflare welcomed approximately 60 Intern-ets from all around the globe on a mission to #HelpBuildABetterInternet. Over the course of their internships, our wonderful interns tackled real-world challenges from different teams all over the company and contributed to cutting-edge projects. As returning interns, we – Shaheen, Aaron, and Jada – would like to show off the great work our cohort has done and experiences we’ve had throughout our time here.
Putting the SHIP in internSHIP
Cloudflare interns take pride in driving high-impact initiatives, playing a vital role in advancing Cloudflare's mission. With our diverse roles and projects this summer, we'd love to highlight some of the exciting work we've been involved in:
Rahul, a Software Engineer intern, built a system to autograde intern application assignments for future students looking to join Cloudflare. It was built entirely on the Cloudflare Developer Platform, using Cloudflare Access, Browser Rendering, D1, Durable Objects, R2, and Workers!
Jessica, a Software Engineer intern, created a new threads api for the Workers AI team that automatically recalls past messages when running inference, helping developers to Continue reading
Why Are OSPF Type 5 LSAs Flooded?
I recently saw a great question on Reddit, on why Type-5 (AS-external) LSAs are flooded, in comparison to Type-3 (Summary) that are regenerated at the ABR. To investigate this, we’ll use the following simple topology where R2 and R3 are ABRs:
OSPF Behavior Type-3 LSAs
Let’s see how OSPF handles Summary LSAs. Let’s first look at Area 1, where R4 is advertising 169.254.0.0/24 into it. This can be seen in the LSDB of R2:
R2#show ip ospf data router 203.0.113.4
OSPF Router with ID (203.0.113.2) (Process ID 1)
Router Link States (Area 1)
LS age: 74
Options: (No TOS-capability, DC)
LS Type: Router Links
Link State ID: 203.0.113.4
Advertising Router: 203.0.113.4
LS Seq Number: 80000009
Checksum: 0x1DF0
Length: 84
Number of Links: 5
Link connected to: a Stub Network
(Link ID) Network/subnet number: 169.254.0.0
(Link Data) Network Mask: 255.255.255.0
Number of MTID metrics: 0
TOS 0 Metrics: 1
Link connected to: another Router (point-to-point)
(Link ID) Neighboring Router ID: 203.0.113.3
(Link Data) Router Interface address: 192.0.2.14
Number of MTID metrics: 0
TOS 0 Continue reading
BGP Session and Address Family Parameters
As I was doing the final integration tests for netlab release 1.9.0, I stumbled upon a fascinating BGP configuration quirk: where do you configure the allowas-in parameter and why?
A Bit of Theory
BGP runs over TCP, and all parameters related to the TCP session are configured for a BGP neighbor (IPv4 or IPv6 address). That includes the source interface, local AS number (it’s advertised in the per-session OPEN message that negotiates the address families), MD5 password (it uses MD5 checksum of TCP packets), GTSM (it uses the IP TTL field), or EBGP multihop (it increases the IP TTL field).
How to Create VyOS Firewall Rules?
Hi all, welcome back to another blog post on VyOS. In the previous post, we covered how to install VyOS and set up the initial configurations. In this blog post, we'll cover how to configure firewall rules in VyOS. To demonstrate, we'll create a hypothetical office setup with a VyOS router/firewall. The router will have two interfaces - one facing the Users and another facing the Internet. Our goal is to allow the Users subnet to access the Internet for ICMP, DNS, and general web traffic.
Diagram
Our example is based on the following diagram. I don't have a public IP address on my lab but just play along and pretend that 10.10.0.7 is a public IP 😊 (This IP is behind my ISP's router)
As you can see in the diagram, the VyOS router has two interfaces. The interface connected to the Users subnet (Eth1) has an IP address of 10.1.1.1/24. There's also a test machine in this subnet with the IP address 10.1.1.15. Our goal is to ensure that this test machine can successfully ping an Internet IP address and browse the general Internet.
VyOS Firewall Basics
Palo Alto Firewall For Absolute Beginners
Hi all, if you are here, I assume you're looking to learn about Palo Alto Firewalls, and you've come to the right place. In this blog post, we will cover the very basics of Palo Alto firewalls and how to get started.
Prerequisites
This blog post assumes you have a basic understanding of networking concepts such as routing, Layer 3 interfaces, traffic flow, subnets, and the necessity of a firewall. If you’ve previously used firewalls from different vendors, that’s even better, and you should find it easier to understand the concepts. When I first started with Palo Alto firewalls, I was already working as a network engineer and had experience with Cisco ASA firewalls. However, it still took some time for me to fully understand the nuances. Therefore, my focus here is to explain the nuances of Palo Alto firewalls using simple examples.
What We Will Cover?
In this post, we’ll touch on several key topics related to Palo Alto firewalls, providing an overview without diving too deep into any single area. I’ve written numerous posts on Palo Alto firewalls, and I will include links to those for more in-depth exploration. Here’s what we’ll cover.
- Firewall Basics and Why We Continue reading
Inter-Domain Traffic-Engineering Based MPLS-LSPs
Recently I was exploring solution to have inter-domain traffic-engineerig based MPLS LSPs and came up with following writeup (after going through relevant rfc and vendor Implementation document (my favourite Junos). Please glance through it on my github home page. thanks
https://github.com/kashif-nawaz/Inter-Domain-Traffic-Engineering-and-MPLS-LSPs
HN745: Using Abstractions in Automation
Today’s episode of Heavy Networking comes to you from AutoCon1 in Amsterdam, recorded live on premises. In today’s network automation discussion, we cover abstraction layers with guest Jaakko Rautanen. Practically speaking, what are abstractions, and how do they help make your network automation project successful? We’ll also discuss some of our guest’s automation projects, how... Read more »A wild week in phishing, and what it means for you
Being a bad guy on the Internet is a really good business. In more than 90% of cybersecurity incidents, phishing is the root cause of the attack, and during this third week of August phishing attacks were reported against the U.S. elections, in the geopolitical conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, and to cause $60M in corporate losses.
You might think that after 30 years of email being the top vector for attack and risk we are helpless to do anything about it, but that would be giving too much credit to bad actors, and a misunderstanding of how defenders focused on detections can take control and win.
Phishing isn’t about email exclusively, or any specific protocol for that matter. Simply put, it is an attempt to get a person, like you or me, to take an action that unwittingly leads to damages. These attacks work because they appear to be authentic, visually or organizationally, such as pretending to be the CEO or CFO of your company, and when you break it down they are three main attack vectors that Cloudflare has seen most impactful from the bad emails we protect our customers Continue reading
A wild week in phishing, and what it means for you
This post is also available in 한국어, 日本語, 简体中文, 繁體中文, Français, Deutsch and Español.
Being a bad guy on the Internet is a really good business. In more than 90% of cybersecurity incidents, phishing is the root cause of the attack, and during this third week of August phishing attacks were reported against the U.S. elections, in the geopolitical conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, and to cause $60M in corporate losses.
You might think that after 30 years of email being the top vector for attack and risk we are helpless to do anything about it, but that would be giving too much credit to bad actors, and a misunderstanding of how defenders focused on detections can take control and win.
Phishing isn’t about email exclusively, or any specific protocol for that matter. Simply put, it is an attempt to get a person, like you or me, to take an action that unwittingly leads to damages. These attacks work because they appear to be authentic, visually or organizationally, such as pretending to be the CEO or CFO of your company, and when you break it down they are three Continue reading
Introducing high-definition portrait video support for Cloudflare Stream
Cloudflare Stream is an end-to-end solution for video encoding, storage, delivery, and playback. Our focus has always been on simplifying all aspects of video for developers. This goal continues to motivate us as we introduce first-class portrait (vertical) video support today. Newly uploaded or ingested portrait videos will now automatically be processed in full HD quality.
Why portrait video
In the past few years, the popularity of portrait video has exploded, motivated by short-form video content applications such as TikTok or YouTube Shorts. However, Cloudflare customers have been confused as to why their portrait videos appear to be lower quality when viewed on portrait-first devices such as smartphones. This is because our video encoding pipeline previously did not support high-quality portrait videos, leading them to be grainy and lower quality. This pain point has now been addressed with the introduction of high-definition portrait video.
The current stream pipeline
When you upload a video to Stream, it is first encoded into several different “renditions” (sizes or resolutions) before delivery. This is done in order to enable playback in a wide variety of network conditions, as well as to standardize the way a video is experienced. By using these adaptive Continue reading