PP022: Inside an Equipment Test Lab

HW031: Wi-Fi Surveys – Past, Present & Future

DDoS threat report for 2024 Q2

Welcome to the 18th edition of the Cloudflare DDoS Threat Report. Released quarterly, these reports provide an in-depth analysis of the DDoS threat landscape as observed across the Cloudflare network. This edition focuses on the second quarter of 2024.

With a 280 terabit per second network located across over 230 cities worldwide, serving 19% of all websites, Cloudflare holds a unique vantage point that enables us to provide valuable insights and trends to the broader Internet community.

Key insights for 2024 Q2

• Cloudflare recorded a 20% year-over-year increase in DDoS attacks.
• 1 out of every 25 survey respondents said that DDoS attacks against them were carried out by state-level or state-sponsored threat actors.
• Threat actor capabilities reached an all-time high as our automated defenses generated 10 times more fingerprints to counter and mitigate the ultrasophisticated DDoS attacks.

View the interactive version of this report on Cloudflare Radar.

Quick recap - what is a DDoS attack?

Before diving in deeper, let's recap what a DDoS attack is. Short for Distributed Denial of Service, a DDoS attack is a type of cyber attack designed to take down or disrupt Internet services, such as websites or mobile apps, making them unavailable Continue reading

RADIUS/UDP vulnerable to improved MD5 collision attack

The MD5 cryptographic hash function was first broken in 2004, when researchers demonstrated the first MD5 collision, namely two different messages X1 and X2 where MD5(X1) = MD5 (X2). Over the years, attacks on MD5 have only continued to improve, getting faster and more effective against real protocols. But despite continuous advancements in cryptography, MD5 has lurked in network protocols for years, and is still playing a critical role in some protocols even today.

One such protocol is RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service). RADIUS was first designed in 1991 – during the era of dial-up Internet – but it remains an important authentication protocol used for remote access to routers, switches, and other networking gear by users and administrators. In addition to being used in networking environments, RADIUS is sometimes also used in industrial control systems.  RADIUS traffic is still commonly transported over UDP in the clear, protected only by outdated cryptographic constructions based on MD5.

In this post, we present an improved attack against MD5 and use it to exploit all authentication modes of RADIUS/UDP apart from those that use EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol). The attack allows a Monster-in-the-Middle (MitM) with access to RADIUS traffic Continue reading

802.1Q-Tagged Frames Through Unmanaged Switch – Forwarded or Dropped?

As a follow-up to the post yesterday on native VLANs, there was a question on what would happen to 802.1Q-tagged frames traversing an unmanaged switch. Unmanaged in this case being a switch that does not support VLANs. While this might be more of a theoretical question today, it’s still interesting to dive into it to better understand how a 802.1Q-tagged frame is different from an untagged frame.

Before we can answer the question on what a VLAN-unaware switch should do, let’s refresh our memory on the Ethernet header. The Ethernet frame consists of Destination MAC, Source MAC, Ethertype, and FCS. 802.1Q adds an additional four bytes consisting of Tag Protocol Identifier (TPID) and Tag Control Information (TCI). This is shown below:

Note how the TPID in the tagged frame is in the place of EtherType for untagged frames. It’s also a 2-byte field and the TPID is set to 0x8100 for tagged frames. The EtherType field is still there and would be for example 0x0800 for IPv4 payload.

To demonstrate what this looks like on the wire, I’ve setup two routers with the following configuration:

hostname R1
!
vrf definition ETHERNET
 !
 address-family ipv4
 exit-address-family
!
interface GigabitEthernet1.100
 encapsulation  Continue reading

Embracing Modern Virtualization with Calico’s Microsegmentation

In the rapidly evolving landscape of IT infrastructure, enterprises are increasingly moving away from traditional virtualization platforms due to rising licensing costs and the limitations these older systems impose on modern cloud-native application needs. The shift towards Kubernetes, which can manage diverse workloads such as containers, virtual machines (VMs), and bare metal environments, accelerates the migration from traditional virtualization platforms.

The Limitations of Traditional Network Segmentation

Traditionally, enterprises have segmented their virtualized environments using VLANs and logical switches to create distinct virtual networks and security zones. This segmentation was primarily static VM environments. However, this traditional approach to network segmentation is ill-equipped to handle the dynamic nature of Kubernetes environments, where workloads are frequently created and destroyed, leading to rapidly changing network configurations and policies.

Calico’s Solution: Dynamic and Unified Microsegmentation

Calico is designed to address the shortcomings of traditional network segmentation in the age of Kubernetes and container-based architectures. Calico provides a robust, dynamic, and high-performance network policy engine that supports a diverse range of workloads and scales across environments.

Key Features of Calico’s Microsegmentation:

1. Unified Security Model: Calico offers a consistent security model across various environments, whether you are managing VMs, containers, or bare metal. This unified approach Continue reading

Embracing Modern Virtualization with Calico’s Microsegmentation

In the rapidly evolving landscape of IT infrastructure, enterprises are increasingly moving away from traditional virtualization platforms due to rising licensing costs and the limitations these older systems impose on modern cloud-native application needs. The shift towards Kubernetes, which can manage diverse workloads such as containers, virtual machines (VMs), and bare metal environments, accelerates the migration from traditional virtualization platforms.

The Limitations of Traditional Network Segmentation

Traditionally, enterprises have segmented their virtualized environments using VLANs and logical switches to create distinct virtual networks and security zones. This segmentation was primarily static VM environments. However, this traditional approach to network segmentation is ill-equipped to handle the dynamic nature of Kubernetes environments, where workloads are frequently created and destroyed, leading to rapidly changing network configurations and policies.

Calico’s Solution: Dynamic and Unified Microsegmentation

Calico’s microsegmentation capabilities are designed to address the shortcomings of traditional network segmentation in the age of Kubernetes and container-based architectures. Calico provides a robust, dynamic, and high-performance network policy engine that supports a diverse range of workloads and scales across environments.

Key Features of Calico’s Microsegmentation:

1. Unified Security Model: Calico offers a consistent security model across various environments, whether you are managing VMs, containers, or bare metal. This Continue reading

Tech Bytes: High Performance, Scalable Object Storage with MinIO (Sponsored)

French elections: political cyber attacks and Internet traffic shifts

The 2024 French legislative election runoff on July 7 yielded surprising results compared to the first round on June 30, with the New Popular Front (NPF) gaining the most seats, followed by French President Macron’s Ensemble party, and the National Rally. Coalition negotiations will follow. In this post, we examine the ongoing online attacks against French political parties and how initial election predictions at 20:00 local time led to a noticeable drop in France’s Internet traffic.

This blog post is part of a series tracking the numerous elections of 2024. We have covered elections in South Africa, India, Iceland, Mexico, the European Union, the UK and also the 2024 US presidential debate. We also continuously update our election report on Cloudflare Radar.

Let’s start with the attacks, and then move on to the Internet traffic trends.

Political parties under attack

As we highlighted last week, the first round of the French elections saw specific DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks targeting French political party websites. While online attacks are common and not always election-related, recent activities in France, the Netherlands, and the UK confirm that DDoS attacks frequently target political parties during election Continue reading

NB486: Chrome Ditches Entrust Certs; Do AI Stocks Mirror the DotCom Bubble?

Why Do We Have Native VLANs?

Recently, my friend Andy Lapteff asked an excellent question. Why do we have native VLANs? As in, why allow untagged frames on a trunk link?

There was a time where we didn’t have VLANs. At first there was hubs, then bridges, multi-port bridges, and finally switches. Cisco was one of the first vendors to introduce VLANs, even before it became a standard, through the use of Inter Switch Links (ISL). ISL is long gone and encapsulated the entire Ethernet frame so native VLANs were not relevant there. In 1998, the 802.1Q standard was released.

In 802.1Q, 1.2 VLAN aims and benefits, the following is described:

a) VLANs are supported over all IEEE 802 LAN MAC protocols, and over shared media LANs as well as point-to-point LANs.
b) VLANs facilitate easy administration of logical groups of stations that can communicate as if they were on the same LAN. They also facilitate easier administration of moves, adds, and changes in members of these groups.
c) Traffic between VLANs is restricted. Bridges forward unicast, multicast, and broadcast traffic only
on LAN segments that serve the VLAN to which the traffic belongs.
d) As far as possible, VLANs maintain compatibility Continue reading

BGP Labs: a Year Later

Last summer, I started a long-term project to revive the BGP labs I created in the mid-1990s. I completed the original lab exercises (BGP sessions, IBGP, local preference, MED, communities) in late 2023 but then kept going. This is how far I got in a year:

• Twenty-six deploy BGP exercises, including advanced settings like AS path manipulations, MD5 passwords and BFD, and new technologies like TCP/AO and interface EBGP sessions.
• Fifteen BGP routing policies exercises, covering the basic mechanisms as well as dirty tricks like route disaggregation
• Four load balancing exercises, from EBGP ECMP to BGP Link Bandwidth and BGP Additional Paths.
• Five challenges for everyone who got bored doing the simple stuff ;)

That completes the BGP technologies I wanted to cover. I’ll keep adding the challenge labs and advanced scenarios. Here are some ideas; if you have others, please leave a comment.

blog.ipspace.net Is On Cloudflare Pages

Long story short: Years after migrating my blog to Hugo, I found the willpower to deal with the “interesting” way Cloudflare Pages deal with static HTML files, changed the Hugo URL scheme, and spent two days fixing broken links.

Apart from having the satisfaction of ticking off a long-outstanding project, the blog pages should load faster, and I won’t have to deal with GitLab hiccups anymore.

If you notice anything being broken, please let me know. Thank you!

Hedge 233: Making Heat Productive

Data centers turn large amounts of electricity into heat. Is it possible to recover even some part of this heat rather than throwing it off into the local environment? David Krebs of masterresource.org brings his vast experience with using heat from engines to bear on the problem to propose solutions.

download

Weekend Reads 070524

Anybody not involved in the telephone business will probably be surprised to find that the old TDM telephone networks are still very much alive and in place.

Intel has demonstrated an optical chiplet co-packaged with a CPU capable of supporting 4 Tbps data links to feed the increasing datacenter bandwidth requirements of AI and high performance computing (HPC) applications.

My one-liner for The AI Delusion is that the real danger today is not that computers are smarter than us but that we think computers are smarter than us and consequently trust them to make decisions they should not be trusted to make.

If the Senate passes an expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, any Americanﾒs international communications could become an open book.

Anybody who builds fiber networks can describe the litany of state and local regulations involved in constructing fiber. Following are the primary kinds of such regulations ﾖ and there are others in some places.

OpenSSH maintainers have released security updates to contain a critical security flaw that could result in unauthenticated remote code execution with root privileges in glibc-based Linux systems.

This only works for so long. Software can keep getting bigger and slower only for as Continue reading

Palo Alto – Remove Unused Address Objects Using Pan-OS-PHP

If you’ve worked with Palo Alto firewalls, you might have noticed they don’t make it easy to get rid of unused address objects. It seems like such a basic feature should be included, right? While you could use Expedition for this, it requires setting up a separate server and learning a new tool, which might be more hassle than it’s worth.

I’ve talked before about using a simple Python script to clean up unused address objects (link below), but it was pretty basic and I didn't take many scenarios into account. Today, I want to show you an even easier more sophisticated way to handle this using Pan-OS-PHP. This tool is fantastic because you can use it directly from the command line. You don’t need to know any PHP to get started. Let’s look at how this can make managing your firewall a lot easier.

Palo Alto Firewall - Find and Remove Unused Address Objects

In this blog post, I’ll show you a very simple Python script to find unused address objects from the Palo Alto firewall or Panorama and remove them if needed.

PacketswitchSuresh Vina

Terraform for Network Engineers: Part Two

Before diving in, if you haven’t read the first part of this series, I highly recommend starting there. In the introductory post, we covered the basics of Terraform and explored how network engineers can leverage it.

In part two, we will:

1. Explore the provider documentation for Panorama.
2. Set up our project and create some resources and go through the Terraform workflow.
3. Review the state file.
4. Reflect on our achievements so far: Have we made our lives easier?

Provider Documentation

All Terraform providers have their documentation available on the Terraform website, following a similar structure.The Panorama provider documentation can be found here.

Here are a couple of screenshots highlighting the key sections of the Panorama provider documentation.

If you drill down into a Resource, you can find how the configuration block would look and what are the arguments you can pass to it.

Project Setup and Workflow

We'll set up all the files and folders needed to create resources on Panorama using Terraform. I prefer to keep my Terraform projects organized. Below is the structure I typically follow for my projects.

mkdir tf-neteng
cd tf-neteng
touch  Continue reading

Calico monthly roundup: June 2024

Welcome to the Calico monthly roundup: June edition! From open source news to live events, we have exciting updates to share—let’s get into it!

S&P Global 451 Market Insight: Tigera Provides Most Comprehensive CNAPP Learn how Tigera differentiates itself from competitors by focusing on runtime security, aligning with the rapidly growing market category and how it is one of the strong players in this segment. Read the blog post.

Your Guide to Observability This guide explains what observability is and shows you how to use Calico’s observability tools. With these tools, you can find and troubleshoot issues with workload communications, performance, and operations in a Kubernetes cluster.Read case study.

Customer case study: eHealth Calico helped eHealth gain visibility and implement zero-trust security controls on Amazon EKS. Read the case study to learn more. View more tradeshows.

Open source news

Kubernetes network policies: 4 pain points and how to address them – Learn about the challenges of implementing Kubernetes network policies and how to simplify their management and enhance security using Calico. Read blog post.

The power of Kubevirt and Calico – Unlock the combined power of Kubevirt and Calico for your Kubernetes environments. Learn how to streamline VM management, Continue reading

UK election day 2024: traffic trends and attacks on political parties

The 2024 UK general election, the first since Brexit officially began (January 31, 2020) and after 14 years of Conservative leadership, saw the Labour Party secure a majority. This blog post examines Internet traffic trends and cyberattack activity on election day, highlighting notable declines in traffic during the afternoon and evening as well as a DDoS attack on a political party shortly after polls closed.

For context, 2024 is considered “the year of elections,” with elections taking place in over 60 countries. We’ve covered elections in South Africa, India, Iceland, Mexico, the European Union, France, and also the 2024 US presidential debate. We also continuously update our election report on Cloudflare Radar.

The UK’s snap election on Thursday, July 4, 2024, typical of British Thursday weekday elections, contrasts with weekend elections in other countries. Polling stations were open from 07:00 to 22:00.

Generally, election days do not result in drastic changes to Internet traffic. Traffic typically dips during voting hours but not as sharply as during major events like national holidays, and rises in the evening as results are announced.

On July 4, 2024, traffic initially rose slightly from the previous week, then fell around noon Continue reading

Review: R86S (Jasper Lake – N6005)

Introduction

I am always interested in finding new hardware that is capable of running VPP. Of course, a standard issue 19” rack mountable machine like a Dell, HPE or SuperMicro machine is an obvious choice. They come with redundant power supplies, PCIe v3.0 or better expansion slots, and can boot off of mSATA or NVME, with plenty of RAM. But for some people and in some locations, the power envelope or size/cost of these 19” rack mountable machines can be prohibitive. Sometimes, just having a smaller form factor can be very useful:
Enter the GoWin R86S!

I stumbled across this lesser known build from GoWin, which is an ultra compact but modern design, featuring three 2.5GbE ethernet ports and optionally two 10GbE, or as I’ll show here, two 25GbE ports. What I really liked about the machine is that it comes with 32GB of LPDDR4 memory and can boot off of an m.2 NVME – which makes it immediately an appealing device to put in the field. I noticed that the height of the machine is just a few millimeters smaller than 1U which is 1.75” (44.5mm), which gives me the bright idea to 3D Continue reading