The Hedge #73: Daniel Teycheney and Open Source in Networking
Combining, or stitching together, open source projects to build something unique for your network is becoming more common. What does this look like in the real world? What are some of the positive and negative aspects of building things this way? How do open source projects interact with the commercial world? Daniel Teycheney joins Tom Ammon, Jett Tantsura, and Russ White to discuss open source software in networking, particularly around network monitoring and management.
Prepare for That Next Natural Disaster: Lessons Learned in Texas
If the Texas storms last month taught us nothing else, it's that disasters have a way of striking, regardless of whether we're ready for them.Conntrack turns a blind eye to dropped SYNs
Intro
We have been working with conntrack, the connection tracking layer in the Linux kernel, for years. And yet, despite the collected know-how, questions about its inner workings occasionally come up. When they do, it is hard to resist the temptation to go digging for answers.
One such question popped up while writing the previous blog post on conntrack:
“Why are there no entries in the conntrack table for SYN packets dropped by the firewall?”
Ready for a deep dive into the network stack? Let’s find out.
We already know from last time that conntrack is in charge of tracking incoming and outgoing network traffic. By running conntrack -L we can inspect existing network flows, or as conntrack calls them, connections.
So if we spin up a toy VM, connect to it over SSH, and inspect the contents of the conntrack table, we will see…
$ vagrant init fedora/33-cloud-base
$ vagrant up
…
$ vagrant ssh
Last login: Sun Jan 31 15:08:02 2021 from 192.168.122.1
[vagrant@ct-vm ~]$ sudo conntrack -L
conntrack v1.4.5 (conntrack-tools): 0 flow entries have been shown.
… nothing!
Even though the conntrack kernel Continue reading
New Ansible Data Validation Module(s)
A few months ago I described how you could use JSON Schema to validate your automation data models, host/group variable files, or even Ansible inventory file.
I had to use a weird toolchain to get it done – either ansible-inventory to build a complete data model from various inventory sources, or yq to convert YAML to JSON… and just for the giggles jsonschema CLI command requires the JSON input to reside in a file, so you have to use a temporary file to get the job done.
New Ansible Data Validation Module(s)
A few months ago I described how you could use JSON Schema to validate your automation data models, host/group variable files, or even Ansible inventory file.
I had to use a weird toolchain to get it done – either ansible-inventory to build a complete data model from various inventory sources, or yq to convert YAML to JSON… and just for the giggles jsonschema CLI command requires the JSON input to reside in a file, so you have to use a temporary file to get the job done.
Phishing Detection Using Perceptual Hashes
What are phishing attacks?
Phishing attacks have become more prominent and prevalent in recent years. In particular, our research into the cyber threat landscape over the last few months has shown a dramatic increase in the volume of phishing campaigns observed by our customers.
The most basic way to detect phishing is by using blacklists of phishing URLs. However, our research showed that, in many cases, the lifetime of phishing URLs is less than 24 hours, which renders the blacklist approach largely ineffective.
At VMware, we use multiple approaches to detect phishing attacks. The one we’ve found to be the most promising uses visual representation of the website to recognize phishing. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how this approach works in greater detail. If you need an overview of the more general idea behind phishing detection using image similarity, visit our previous blog post.
Not every hash function is a cryptographic hash function
As one part of VMware’s phishing detection, we store information about the visual representation of every analyzed URL: that is, we calculate perceptual hashes of the screenshots Continue reading
Day Two Cloud 087: Inside The World Of A Technical Marketer
Engineers are skeptical of vendor marketing, which is typically heavy on buzzwords and light on actual information. But technical marketing tries to change that dynamic by creating collateral to help engineers and practitioners understand a product. We get into this world with guest Martez Reed, Director of Technical Marketing at Morpheus Data.Day Two Cloud 087: Inside The World Of A Technical Marketer
Engineers are skeptical of vendor marketing, which is typically heavy on buzzwords and light on actual information. But technical marketing tries to change that dynamic by creating collateral to help engineers and practitioners understand a product. We get into this world with guest Martez Reed, Director of Technical Marketing at Morpheus Data.
The post Day Two Cloud 087: Inside The World Of A Technical Marketer appeared first on Packet Pushers.
3 Security Issues Overlooked By the NIST Framework
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework has some omissions but is still great. It should be considered the start of a journey and not the end destination.MANRS Fellowship 2021 Now Open
The MANRS (Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security) Fellowship Program 2021 is now accepting applications. If you are an emerging leader eager to improve the well-being of the Internet’s global routing system, apply now.
The program gives highly motivated individuals the chance to work alongside MANRS Ambassadors – industry leaders participating in the associated Ambassador Program that invited applications last month (details here).
Together, they will train diverse communities on good routing practices, analyze routing incidents, research into ways to secure routing, and survey the global policy landscape.
You can read about the 13 Fellows in last year’s inaugural program, which proved highly popular. The Internet Society supports this program as part of its work to reduce common routing threats and establish norms for network operations.
You can apply for a MANRS Fellowship in three different areas: training, research, and policy. Each Fellow will receive a stipend of $750 a month. The program will start in mid-April and run for up to eight months. You can apply for more than one category but will only be selected for one of them.
Online Training
Responsible for: Conducting MANRS online tutorial and virtual hands-on workshops, helping improve existing training and workshop Continue reading
Using the Python Rich library to display status indicators
I recently added a status indicator to my azruntime application. If users have a lot of VMs in their subscriptions, the azruntime application can take a long time to run. Users will appreciate seeing the status so they know the program is still running and is not hung up.
I used the Rich library to implement a status indicator. I had to learn more about Python context managers to understand how the Rich library’s progress bar and status indicators work. The Rich library’s documentation is aimed at intermediate-to-advanced programmers and the Rich tutorials I found on the web did not cover using the Rich library’s status update features.
In this post, I will share what I learned while adding a status indicator to my program and show you how to implement the same in your projects.
Rich library overview
The Rich library makes it easy to add color and style to terminal output. Rich can also render pretty tables, progress bars, markdown, syntax highlighted source code, tracebacks, and more.1
This post focuses only on creating a status indicator. To learn more about what Rich can do for you, I encourage you to read one of the excellent Rich overviews Continue reading
Chasing Anycast IP Addresses
One of my readers sent me this question:
My job required me to determine if one IP address is unicast or anycast. Is it possible to get this information from the bgp dump?
TL&DR: Not with anything close to 100% reliability.
If you’re not familiar with IP anycast: it’s a brilliant idea of advertising the same prefix from multiple independent locations, or the same IP address from multiple servers. Works like a charm for UDP (that’s how all root DNS servers are built) and supposedly pretty well across distant-enough locations for TCP (with a long list of caveats when used within a data center).
Chasing Anycast IP Addresses
One of my readers sent me this question:
My job required me to determine if one IP address is unicast or anycast. Is it possible to get this information from the bgp dump?
TL&DR: Not with anything close to 100% reliability. An academic research paper (HT: Andrea di Donato) documents a false-positive rate of around 10%.
If you’re not familiar with IP anycast: it’s a brilliant idea of advertising the same prefix from multiple independent locations, or the same IP address from multiple servers. Works like a charm for UDP (that’s how all root DNS servers are built) and supposedly pretty well across distant-enough locations for TCP (with a long list of caveats when used within a data center).
SEC 4. Complete guide for integrating Nokia, Arista, Cumulus, as well as CentOS and Raspberry PI Linux in your own PKI
Hello my friend,
In one of the previous blogposts we have share the details how you can build the containerised PKI relying Docker, Alpine Linux and OpenSSL. Today we’ll show how you can use it.
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retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the
prior permission of the author.
How automation can increase the security?
In one of the recent articles dedicated to threats to the national security with respect to 5G caused by the current operation models in the big service providers, one the network automation were named as one of the key mitigation approaches. The reason is very simple: network automation allows you to keep (or even increase) the pace of the network changes with increasing the stability without increasing the size of your network operation teams.
We absolutely agree with this statement. We have observed ourselves that in many cases the key technical competence for service providers is being outsourced and in certain cases the service providers have to rely on the external parties to perform Continue reading