The Lingering Effect of Blind Spots in the Cloud
With visibility into your network, cloud services, product development, and your users, you can make significant gains across your security and compliance risks and your budget.Grafana Cloud
Grafana Cloud is a cloud hosted version of Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki. The free tier makes it easy to try out the service and has enough capability to satisfy simple use cases. In this article we will explore how metrics based on sFlow streaming telemetry can be pushed into Grafana Cloud.
docker run -p 8008:8008 -p 6343:6343/udp --name sflow-rt -d sflow/prometheusUse Docker to run the pre-built sflow/prometheus image which packages sFlow-RT with the sflow-rt/prometheus application. Configure sFlow agents to stream data to this instance.
Create a Grafana Cloud account. Click on the Agent button on the home page to get the configuration settings for the Grafana Agent.
Click on the Prometheus button to get the configuration to forward metrics from the Grafana Agent.
server:
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Introducing SSL/TLS Recommender
Seven years ago, Cloudflare made HTTPS availability for any Internet property easy and free with Universal SSL. At the time, few websites — other than those that processed sensitive data like passwords and credit card information — were using HTTPS because of how difficult it was to set up.
However, as we all started using the Internet for more and more private purposes (communication with loved ones, financial transactions, shopping, healthcare, etc.) the need for encryption became apparent. Tools like Firesheep demonstrated how easily attackers could snoop on people using public Wi-Fi networks at coffee shops and airports. The Snowden revelations showed the ease with which governments could listen in on unencrypted communications at scale. We have seen attempts by browser vendors to increase HTTPS adoption such as the recent announcement by Chromium for loading websites on HTTPS by default. Encryption has become a vital part of the modern Internet, not just to keep your information safe, but to keep you safe.
When it was launched, Universal SSL doubled the number of sites on the Internet using HTTPS. We are building on that with SSL/TLS Recommender, a tool that guides you to stronger configurations for the backend connection Continue reading
Dynamic Process Isolation: Research by Cloudflare and TU Graz
Last year, I wrote about the Cloudflare Workers security model, including how we fight Spectre attacks. In that post, I explained that there is no known complete defense against Spectre — regardless of whether you're using isolates, processes, containers, or virtual machines to isolate tenants. What we do have, though, is a huge number of tools to increase the cost of a Spectre attack, to the point where it becomes infeasible. Cloudflare Workers has been designed from the very beginning with protection against side channel attacks in mind, and because of this we have been able to incorporate many defenses that other platforms — such as virtual machines and web browsers — cannot. However, the performance and scalability requirements of edge compute make it infeasible to run every Worker in its own private process, so we cannot rely on the usual defenses provided by the operating system kernel and address space separation.
Given our different approach, we cannot simply rely on others to tell us if we are safe. We had to do our own research. To do this we partnered with researchers at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) to study the impact of Spectre on our environment. The Continue reading
Handshake Encryption: Endgame (an ECH update)
Privacy and security are fundamental to Cloudflare, and we believe in and champion the use of cryptography to help provide these fundamentals for customers, end-users, and the Internet at large. In the past, we helped specify, implement, and ship TLS 1.3, the latest version of the transport security protocol underlying the web, to all of our users. TLS 1.3 vastly improved upon prior versions of the protocol with respect to security, privacy, and performance: simpler cryptographic algorithms, more handshake encryption, and fewer round trips are just a few of the many great features of this protocol.
TLS 1.3 was a tremendous improvement over TLS 1.2, but there is still room for improvement. Sensitive metadata relating to application or user intent is still visible in plaintext on the wire. In particular, all client parameters, including the name of the target server the client is connecting to, are visible in plaintext. For obvious reasons, this is problematic from a privacy perspective: Even if your application traffic to crypto.cloudflare.com is encrypted, the fact you’re visiting crypto.cloudflare.com can be quite revealing.
And so, in collaboration with other participants in the standardization community and members of Continue reading
Privacy Pass v3: the new privacy bits
In November 2017, we released our implementation of a privacy preserving protocol to let users prove that they are humans without enabling tracking. When you install Privacy Pass’s browser extension, you get tokens when you solve a Cloudflare CAPTCHA which can be used to avoid needing to solve one again... The redeemed token is cryptographically unlinkable to the token originally provided by the server. That is why Privacy Pass is privacy preserving.
In October 2019, Privacy Pass reached another milestone. We released Privacy Pass Extension v2.0 that includes a new service provider (hCaptcha) which provides a way to redeem a token not only with CAPTCHAs in the Cloudflare challenge pages but also hCaptcha CAPTCHAs in any website. When you encounter any hCaptcha CAPTCHA in any website, including the ones not behind Cloudflare, you can redeem a token to pass the CAPTCHA.
We believe Privacy Pass solves an important problem — balancing privacy and security for bot mitigation— but we think there’s more to be done in terms of both the codebase and the protocol. We improved the codebase by redesigning how the service providers interact with the core extension. At the same time, we made progress on the Continue reading
Network Break 354: VMworld’s Constipation, Facebook Footgun, Marvell 5nm DPUs
This week on Network Break, VMware disgorges a slew of announcements at VMworld 2021, Facebook shoots itself in the foot with BGP and DNS bullets, Marvell announces new silicon for Data Processing Units (DPUs), and more tech news analysis.
The post Network Break 354: VMworld’s Constipation, Facebook Footgun, Marvell 5nm DPUs appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Network Break 354: VMworld’s Constipation, Facebook Footgun, Marvell 5nm DPUs
This week on Network Break, VMware disgorges a slew of announcements at VMworld 2021, Facebook shoots itself in the foot with BGP and DNS bullets, Marvell announces new silicon for Data Processing Units (DPUs), and more tech news analysis.Graceful Restart and Routing Protocol Convergence
I’m always amazed when I encounter networking engineers who want to have a fast-converging network using Non-Stop Forwarding (which implies Graceful Restart). It’s even worse than asking for smooth-running heptagonal wheels.
As we discussed in the Fast Failover series, any decent router uses a variety of mechanisms to detect adjacent device failure:
- Physical link failure;
- Routing protocol timeouts;
- Next-hop liveliness checks (BFD, CFM…)
Graceful Restart and Routing Protocol Convergence
I’m always amazed when I encounter networking engineers who want to have a fast-converging network using Non-Stop Forwarding (which implies Graceful Restart). It’s even worse than asking for smooth-running heptagonal wheels.
As we discussed in the Fast Failover series, any decent router uses a variety of mechanisms to detect adjacent device failure:
- Physical link failure;
- Routing protocol timeouts;
- Next-hop liveliness checks (BFD, CFM…)
Live Stream: The Journey to Architect
On Thursday the 19th of October at 1PM ET, I’ll be joining Keith Bogart for the em>INE Live live stream. You can find the details on their web site.
In this session, Keith Bogart will interview prolific author and Network Architect, Russ White Ph.D. One of only a handful of people who have attained CCAr status, Russ White has authored several books such as “Practical BGP”, “The Art of Network Architecture” and “Computer Networking Problems And Solutions”. During this session we’ll find out about his journey to becoming a Network Architect and how his passion for technology can inspire you!
Between 0x2 Nerds on Network Complexity
On the 14th (this Thursday), I’ll once again be a guest on a live stream with Jeff T and Jeff D on Between -x2 Nerds.. I think this is the URL, but you can check on their web page later to make certain.
AWS Networking – Part X: VPC Internet Gateway Service – Part Two
Associate SG and Elastic-IP with EC2
In the previous section, we create an Internet Gateway for our VPC. We also add a static route towards IGW into the Route Table of Subnet 10.10.0.0/24. In this section, we first create a Security Group (SG). The SG allows SSH connection to the EC2 instance and ICMP from the EC2. Then we launch an EC2 and attach the previously configure SG to it. As the last step, we allocate an Elastic IP address (EIP) from the AWS Ipv4 address pool and associate it with the EC instance. When we are done with all the previous steps, we will test the connection. First, we take ssh connection from MyPC to EC2. Then, we ping MyPC from the EC2. We also use AWS Reachability Analyzer to validate the path from IGE to EC2 instance. The last section introduces AWS billing related to this chapter.
Figure 3-20: EC2 Instance, Elastic IP, and Security Group.
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