Flexible Automation For A Complex Enterprise: Gluware LiveStream Video [4/8]
Angelo Rossi, GNS LAN-WAN Architect at WSP joins Drew Conry-Murray of the Packet Pushers to explain how WSP automated their brownfield network with Gluware. If Gluware might be a fit for your network automation needs, visit here. Thanks! You can subscribe to the Packet Pushers’ YouTube channel for more videos as they are published. It’s […]
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Privacy-Preserving Compromised Credential Checking
Today we’re announcing a public demo and an open-sourced Go implementation of a next-generation, privacy-preserving compromised credential checking protocol called MIGP (“Might I Get Pwned”, a nod to Troy Hunt’s “Have I Been Pwned”). Compromised credential checking services are used to alert users when their credentials might have been exposed in data breaches. Critically, the ‘privacy-preserving’ property of the MIGP protocol means that clients can check for leaked credentials without leaking any information to the service about the queried password, and only a small amount of information about the queried username. Thus, not only can the service inform you when one of your usernames and passwords may have become compromised, but it does so without exposing any unnecessary information, keeping credential checking from becoming a vulnerability itself. The ‘next-generation’ property comes from the fact that MIGP advances upon the current state of the art in credential checking services by allowing clients to not only check if their exact password is present in a data breach, but to check if similar passwords have been exposed as well.
For example, suppose your password last year was amazon20\$, and you change your password each year (so your current password is amazon21\$). Continue reading
Unbuckling the narrow waist of IP: Addressing Agility for Names and Web Services
At large operational scales, IP addressing stifles innovation in network- and web-oriented services. For every architectural change, and certainly when starting to design new systems, the first set of questions we are forced to ask are:
- Which block of IP addresses do or can we use?
- Do we have enough in IPv4? If not, where or how can we get them?
- How do we use IPv6 addresses, and does this affect other uses of IPv6?
- Oh, and what careful plan, checks, time, and people do we need for migration?
Having to stop and worry about IP addresses costs time, money, resources. This may sound surprising, given the visionary and resilient advent of IP, 40+ years ago. By their very design, IP addresses should be the last thing that any network has to think about. However, if the Internet has laid anything bare, it’s that small or seemingly unimportant weaknesses — often invisible or impossible to see at design time — always show up at sufficient scale.
One thing we do know: “more addresses” should never be the answer. In IPv4 that type of thinking only contributes to their scarcity, driving up further their market prices. IPv6 is absolutely necessary, Continue reading
Research Directions in Password Security
As Internet users, we all deal with passwords every day. With so many different services, each with their own login systems, we have to somehow keep track of the credentials we use with each of these services. This situation leads some users to delegate credential storage to password managers like LastPass or a browser-based password manager, but this is far from universal. Instead, many people still rely on old-fashioned human memory, which has its limitations — leading to reused passwords and to security problems. This blog post discusses how Cloudflare Research is exploring how to minimize password exposure and thwart password attacks.
The Problem of Password Reuse
Because it’s too difficult to remember many distinct passwords, people often reuse them across different online services. When breached password datasets are leaked online, attackers can take advantage of these to conduct “credential stuffing attacks”. In a credential stuffing attack, an attacker tests breached credentials against multiple online login systems in an attempt to hijack user accounts. These attacks are highly effective because users tend to reuse the same credentials across different websites, and they have quickly become one of the most prevalent types of online guessing attacks. Automated attacks can be run Continue reading
BGP Optimal Route Reflection 101
Almost a decade ago I described a scenario in which a perfectly valid IBGP topology could result in a permanent routing loop. While one wouldn’t expect to see such a scenario in a well designed network, it’s been known for ages1 that using BGP route reflectors could result in suboptimal forwarding.
Here’s a simple description of how that could happen:
BGP Optimal Route Reflection 101
Almost a decade ago I described a scenario in which a perfectly valid IBGP topology could result in a permanent routing loop. While one wouldn’t expect to see such a scenario in a well designed network, it’s been known for ages1 that using BGP route reflectors could result in suboptimal forwarding.
Here’s a simple description of how that could happen:
Customer Experience Keys: Self-Service, Automation, and SD-WAN
Service providers can take simple steps to improve customer experience in their offerings by leveraging automation and offering self-service.Hedge 104: Automation with David Gee
Automation is often put forward as the answer to all our problems—but without a map, how can we be certain we are moving in the right direction? David Gee joins Tom Ammon and Russ White on this episode of the Hedge to talk about automata without a map. Where did we come from, what are we doing with automation right now, and what do we need to do to map out a truly better future?
Day Two Cloud 119: Unifying Multi-Cloud Security With Valtix (Sponsored)
Ethan Banks & Ned Bellavance have a tech discussion with CEO Doug Murray and CTO Vishal Jain about multi-cloud security startup Valtix. Along the way, we find out that Valtix is a cloud-delivered security control-plane paired with a data-plane of enforcement points (sort of firewalls, but not exactly) delivered between any two points in the cloud you need them. Engineers should walk away from this chat with a solid idea of Valtix architecture and how it fits into their cloud design.
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Day Two Cloud 119: Unifying Multi-Cloud Security With Valtix (Sponsored)
Ethan Banks & Ned Bellavance have a tech discussion with CEO Doug Murray and CTO Vishal Jain about multi-cloud security startup Valtix. Along the way, we find out that Valtix is a cloud-delivered security control-plane paired with a data-plane of enforcement points (sort of firewalls, but not exactly) delivered between any two points in the cloud you need them. Engineers should walk away from this chat with a solid idea of Valtix architecture and how it fits into their cloud design.As API Complexity Grows, Tame It With Centralized Governance
Axway CTIO Vince Padua believes the best path forward is to master growing API complexity, rather than attempt to simplify or consolidate IT ecosystems.Cloudflare and the IETF
The Internet, far from being just a series of tubes, is a huge, incredibly complex, decentralized system. Every action and interaction in the system is enabled by a complicated mass of protocols woven together to accomplish their task, each handing off to the next like trapeze artists high above a virtual circus ring. Stop to think about details, and it is a marvel.
Consider one of the simplest tasks enabled by the Internet: Sending a message from sender to receiver.
The location (address) of a receiver is discovered using DNS, a connection between sender and receiver is established using a transport protocol like TCP, and (hopefully!) secured with a protocol like TLS. The sender's message is encoded in a format that the receiver can recognize and parse, like HTTP, because the two disparate parties need a common language to communicate. Then, ultimately, the message is sent and carried in an IP datagram that is forwarded from sender to receiver based on routes established with BGP.
Even an explanation this dense is laughably oversimplified. For example, the four protocols listed are just the start, and ignore many others with acronyms of their own. The truth is that things are complicated. Continue reading
Pairings in CIRCL
In 2019, we announced the release of CIRCL, an open-source cryptographic library written in Go that provides optimized implementations of several primitives for key exchange and digital signatures. We are pleased to announce a major update of our library: we have included more packages for elliptic curve-based cryptography (ECC), pairing-based cryptography, and quantum-resistant algorithms.
All of these packages are the foundation of work we’re doing on bringing the benefits of cutting edge research to Cloudflare. In the past we’ve experimented with post-quantum algorithms, used pairings to keep keys safe around the world, and implemented advanced elliptic curves. Now we’re continuing that work, and sharing the foundation with everyone.
In this blog post we’re going to focus on pairing-based cryptography and give you a brief overview of some properties that make this topic so pleasant. If you are not so familiar with elliptic curves, we recommend this primer on ECC.
Otherwise, let’s get ready, pairings have arrived!
What are pairings?
Elliptic curve cryptography enables an efficient instantiation of several cryptographic applications: public-key encryption, signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, and many other more exotic applications like oblivious transfer and OPRFs. With all of those applications you might wonder what is Continue reading
Exported Authenticators: The long road to RFC
Our earlier blog post talked in general terms about how we work with the IETF. In this post we’re going to talk about a particular IETF project we’ve been working on, Exported Authenticators (EAs). Exported Authenticators is a new extension to TLS that we think will prove really exciting. It unlocks all sorts of fancy new authentication possibilities, from TLS connections with multiple certificates attached, to logging in to a website without ever revealing your password.
Now, you might have thought that given the innumerable hours that went into the design of TLS 1.3 that it couldn’t possibly be improved, but it turns out that there are a number of places where the design falls a little short. TLS allows us to establish a secure connection between a client and a server. The TLS connection presents a certificate to the browser, which proves the server is authorised to use the name written on the certificate, for example blog.cloudflare.com. One of the most common things we use that ability for is delivering webpages. In fact, if you’re reading this, your browser has already done this for you. The Cloudflare Blog is delivered over TLS, and by presenting a Continue reading
Coalescing Connections to Improve Network Privacy and Performance
Web pages typically have a large number of embedded subresources (e.g., JavaScript, CSS, image files, ads, beacons) that are fetched by a browser on page loads. Requests for these subresources can prompt browsers to perform further DNS lookups, TCP connections, and TLS handshakes, which can have a significant impact on how long it takes for the user to see the content and interact with the page. Further, each additional request exposes metadata (such as plaintext DNS queries, or unencrypted SNI in TLS handshake) which can have potential privacy implications for the user. With these factors in mind, we carried out a measurement study to understand how we can leverage Connection Coalescing (aka Connection Reuse) to address such concerns, and study its feasibility.
Background
The web has come a long way and initially consisted of very simple protocols. One of them was HTTP/1.0, which required browsers to make a separate connection for every subresource on the page. This design was quickly recognized as having significant performance bottlenecks and was extended with HTTP pipelining and persistent connections in HTTP/1.1 revision, which allowed HTTP requests to reuse the same TCP connection. But, yet again, this was no Continue reading
Why Does DHCPv6 Matter?
In case you missed it, there’s a new season of Lack of DHCPv6 on Android soap opera on v6ops mailing list. Before going into the juicy details, I wanted to look at the big picture: why would anyone care about lack of DHCPv6 on Android?
Please note that I’m not a DHCPv6 fan. DHCPv6 is just a tool not unlike sink plunger – nobody loves it (I hope), but when you need it, you better have it handy.
The requirements for DHCPv6-based address allocation come primarily from enterprise environments facing legal/compliance/other layer 8-10 reasons to implement policy (are you allowed to use the network), control (we want to decide who uses the network) and attribution (if something bad happens, we want to know who did it).