Getting Started with Intent-Based Networking
Intent-based networking applies a deep level of intelligence to enterprise networks. Here's how your organization can benefit from this powerful emerging technology.Technologies that Didn’t: Directory Services
One of the most important features of the Network Operating Systems, like Banyan Vines and Novell Netware, available in the middle of the 1980’s was their integrated directory system. These directory systems allowed for the automatic discovery of many different kinds of devices attached to a network, such as printers, servers, and computers. Printers, of course, were the important item in this list, because printers have always been the bane of the network administrator’s existence. An example of one such system, an early version of Active Directory, is shown in the illustration below.
Users, devices and resources, such as file mounts, were stored in a tree. The root of the tree was (generally) the organization. There were Organizational Units (OUs) under this root. Users and devices could belong to an OU, and be given access to devices and services in other OUs through a fairly simple drag and drop, or GUI based checkbox style interface. These systems were highly developed, making it fairly easy to find any sort of resource, including email addresses of other uses in the organization, services such as shared filers, and—yes—even printers.
The original system of this kind was Banyan’s Streetalk, which did not have the Continue reading
Know an Innovator Who’s Made Groundbreaking Contributions to the Internet? Nominate Them to the Internet Hall of Fame
Adiel Akplogan expanded Internet access across Africa. Jean Armour Polly redefined the role of the librarian as a digital educator and Internet advocate. Suguru Yamaguchi led cybersecurity research and helped found organizations to make the Internet more secure.
All three have been recognized with many others by the Internet Hall of Fame for their groundbreaking contributions to the Internet. Their extraordinary work has made the Internet, its global availability and use, and its transformative nature possible.
Do you know of an exceptional individual who has done the same? Perhaps a pioneer who expanded the Internet. A trailblazer who made a major technical innovation to make the Internet faster or better. Or a passionate advocate who made the Internet more inclusive and accessible.
If you answered yes, nominate them to the Internet Hall of Fame!
Nominations for the 2021 class of inductees open today – the deadline is April 23, 2021. Individuals worldwide who have played an extraordinary role in the conceptualization, building, and development of the Internet globally will be considered for induction.
This global pandemic has shown us how critical the Internet is. It is our lifeline, where we communicate, create, connect, and collaborate – and we cannot imagine Continue reading
Virtual Networks and Subnets in AWS, Azure, and GCP
Now that we know what regions and availability zones are, let’s go back to Daniel Dib’s question:
As I understand it, subnets in Azure span availability zones. Do you see any drawback to this? Does subnet matter if your VMs are in different AZs?
Wait, what? A subnet is stretched across multiple failure domains? Didn’t Ivan claim that’s ridiculous?
TL&DR: What I claimed was that a single layer-2 network is a single failure domain. Things are a bit more complex in public clouds. Keep reading and you’ll find out why.
Virtual Networks and Subnets in AWS, Azure, and GCP
Now that we know what regions and availability zones are, let’s go back to Daniel Dib’s question:
As I understand it, subnets in Azure span availability zones. Do you see any drawback to this? Does subnet matter if your VMs are in different AZs?
Wait, what? A subnet is stretched across multiple failure domains? Didn’t Ivan claim that’s ridiculous?
TL&DR: What I claimed was that a single layer-2 network is a single failure domain. Things are a bit more complex in public clouds. Keep reading and you’ll find out why.
Automate Leaf and Spine Deployment – Part4
The 4th post in the ‘Automate Leaf and Spine Deployment’ series goes through the creation of the base and fabric config snippets and their deployment to devices. Loopbacks, NVE and intra-fabric interfaces are configured and both the underlay and overlay routing protocol peerings formed leaving the fabric in a state ready for services to be added.
The Best and the Brightest Security and Privacy Experts Are Gathering Virtually at NDSS 2021
The 28th consecutive Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2021) kicks off today. NDSS is a premier academic research conference addressing a wide range of topics on network and system security. It’s an incubator for new, innovative ideas and research on the security and privacy of the Internet.
NDSS 2021, which takes place 21-25 February, will be one of the biggest NDSS symposia yet, featuring two keynotes, 90 peer-reviewed academic papers, six co-located workshops, and 19 posters focusing on vital and timely topics. All of this will happen virtually for the first time!
Here are some of the highlights.
Workshops
This year’s program officially started yesterday with three workshops on Sunday, 21 February. NDSS workshops are organized around a single topic and provide an opportunity for greater dialogue between researchers and practitioners in the area.
The Binary Analysis Research (BAR) Workshop returns for its fourth year at NDSS. Binary analysis refers to the process where humans and automated systems examine underlying code in software to discover, exploit, and defend against vulnerabilities. With the enormous and ever-increasing amount of software in the world today, formalized and automated methods of analysis are vital to improving security. This workshop will emphasize the Continue reading
Network Break 321: Palo Alto Buys Bridgecrew For IaC Security; Azure Steps Up Its Firewall Game
Today's Network Break discusses an acquisition by Palo Alto Networks that targets the security of Infrastructure as Code, a souped-up firewall for Microsoft Azure, a new private cloud option from Dell, commentary on the wisdom--or lack thereof--about gathering in person in Barcelona for a wireless convention, and more tech news.
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Network Break 321: Palo Alto Buys Bridgecrew For IaC Security; Azure Steps Up Its Firewall Game
Today's Network Break discusses an acquisition by Palo Alto Networks that targets the security of Infrastructure as Code, a souped-up firewall for Microsoft Azure, a new private cloud option from Dell, commentary on the wisdom--or lack thereof--about gathering in person in Barcelona for a wireless convention, and more tech news.Death of Emotet
Cybercrime campaigns can last days or months, but the malicious actors behind them can be active for years.
As it’s often difficult to have first-hand information about the evolution of specific gangs (e.g., changes in membership and leadership, or motivations behind actions), the threat intelligence community generally resorts to tracking the most observable aspects of these criminal enterprises: the malware that is delivered to the victims and the infrastructure that is used to control compromised systems and collect sensitive information.
Malware campaigns are almost always trans-national in terms of both targets and infrastructure, covering multiple countries and sometimes spanning multiple continents. Therefore, it’s difficult to carry out coordinated law enforcement efforts (especially given that many law enforcement agencies are already stretched thin), and the defenses against these threats are primarily localized to specific countries or organizations.
However, sometimes the cyber threats are so egregious that they trigger the attention of a large group of people, resulting in major takedown operations such as 2011’s “Operation Ghost Click” or the Microsoft-led takedown of the TrickBot infrastructure in October 2020.
It was one of these efforts, and a historical one in this case, that brought down Emotet at the end of January 2021 — a feat that many considered impossible.
“Operation Ladybird” saw the law enforcement agencies of multiple countries (including the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Ukraine, and Lithuania) cooperate to eradicate the Emotet infrastructure (see Figure 1).
Emotet, introduced in 2014 as a banking Trojan, has been Continue reading
Notes from NANOG 81
As the pandemic continues, the network operational community continues to meet online. NANOG held its 81st meeting on February 8 and 9, and these are my notes from some of the presentations at that meeting.Rethinking BGP on the DC Fabric (part 4)
Before I continue, I want to remind you what the purpose of this little series of posts is. The point is not to convince you to never use BGP in the DC underlay ever again. There’s a lot of BGP deployed out there, and there are lot of tools that assume BGP in the underlay. I doubt any of that is going to change. The point is to make you stop and think!
Why are we deploying BGP in this way? Is this the right long-term solution? Should we, as a community, be rethinking our desire to use BGP for everything? Are we just “following the crowd” because … well … we think it’s what the “cool kids” are doing, or because “following the crowd” is what we always seem to do?
In my last post, I argued that BGP converges much more slowly than the other options available for the DC fabric underlay control plane. The pushback I received was two-fold. First, the overlay converges fast enough; the underlay convergence time does not really factor into overall convergence time. Second, there are ways to fix things.
If the first pushback is always true—the speed of the underlay control plane Continue reading