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Cisco Live 2019 – Rededicating Community

The 2019 Cisco Live Sign Photo

Another Cisco Live is in the books for me. I was a bit shocked to realize this was my 14th event in a row. I’ve been going to Cisco Live half of the time it’s been around! This year was back in San Diego, which has good and bad points. I’d like to discuss a few of them there and get the thoughts of the community.

Good: The Social Media Hub Has Been Freed! – After last year’s issues with the Social Media Hub being locked behind the World of Solutions, someone at Cisco woke up and realized that social people don’t keep the same hours as the show floor people. So, the Hub was located in a breezeway between the Sails Pavilion and the rest of the convention center. And it was great. People congregated. Couches were used. Discussions were had. And the community was able to come together again. Not during the hours when it was convenient. But a long time. This picture of the big meeting on Thursday just solidifies in my mind why the Social Media Hub has to be in a common area:

You don’t get this kind of Continue reading

Introducing time.cloudflare.com

Introducing time.cloudflare.com

This is a guest post by Aanchal Malhotra, a Graduate Research Assistant at Boston University and former Cloudflare intern on the Cryptography team.

Introducing time.cloudflare.com

Cloudflare has always been a leader in deploying secure versions of insecure Internet protocols and making them available for free for anyone to use. In 2014, we launched one of the world’s first free, secure HTTPS service (Universal SSL) to go along with our existing free HTTP plan. When we launched the 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver, we also supported the new secure versions of DNS (DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS). Today, we are doing the same thing for the Network Time Protocol (NTP), the dominant protocol for obtaining time over the Internet.

This announcement is personal for me. I've spent the last four years identifying and fixing vulnerabilities in time protocols. Today I’m proud to help introduce a service that would have made my life from 2015 through 2019 a whole lot harder: time.cloudflare.com, a free time service that supports both NTP and the emerging Network Time Security (NTS) protocol for securing NTP. Now, anyone can get time securely from all our datacenters in Continue reading

Introducing time.cloudflare.com

Introducing time.cloudflare.com

This is a guest post by Aanchal Malhotra, a Graduate Research Assistant at Boston University and former Cloudflare intern on the Cryptography team.

Introducing time.cloudflare.com

Cloudflare has always been a leader in deploying secure versions of insecure Internet protocols and making them available for free for anyone to use. In 2014, we launched one of the world’s first free, secure HTTPS service (Universal SSL) to go along with our existing free HTTP plan. When we launched the 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver, we also supported the new secure versions of DNS (DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS). Today, as part of Crypto Week 2019, we are doing the same thing for the Network Time Protocol (NTP), the dominant protocol for obtaining time over the Internet.

This announcement is personal for me. I've spent the last four years identifying and fixing vulnerabilities in time protocols. Today I’m proud to help introduce a service that would have made my life from 2015 through 2019 a whole lot harder: time.cloudflare.com, a free time service that supports both NTP and the emerging Network Time Security (NTS) protocol for securing NTP. Now, anyone can get Continue reading

Carrier services help expand healthcare, with 5G in the offing

There are connectivity options aplenty for most types of IoT deployment, but the idea of simply handing the networking part of the equation off to a national licensed wireless carrier could be the best one for certain kinds of deployments in the medical field.Telehealth systems, for example, are still a relatively new facet of modern medicine, but they’re already among the most important applications that use carrier networks to deliver care. One such system is operated by the University of Mississippi Medical Center, for the treatment and education of diabetes patients.To read this article in full, please click here

Several deals solidify the hybrid cloud’s status as the cloud of choice

The hybrid cloud market is expected to grow from $38.27 billion in 2017 to $97.64 billion by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17.0% during the forecast period, according to Markets and Markets.The research firm said the hybrid cloud is rapidly becoming a leading cloud solution, as it provides various benefits, such as cost, efficiency, agility, mobility, and elasticity. One of the many reasons is the need for interoperability standards between cloud services and existing systems.Unless you are a startup company and can be born in the cloud, you have legacy data systems that need to be bridged, which is where the hybrid cloud comes in.To read this article in full, please click here

Several deals solidify the hybrid cloud’s status as the cloud of choice

The hybrid cloud market is expected to grow from $38.27 billion in 2017 to $97.64 billion by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17.0% during the forecast period, according to Markets and Markets.The research firm said the hybrid cloud is rapidly becoming a leading cloud solution, as it provides various benefits, such as cost, efficiency, agility, mobility, and elasticity. One of the many reasons is the need for interoperability standards between cloud services and existing systems.Unless you are a startup company and can be born in the cloud, you have legacy data systems that need to be bridged, which is where the hybrid cloud comes in.To read this article in full, please click here

Helium – Venture Capital Con Job or Viable Business ?

The company 'Helium' appears to be attempting to build a national Low Power WAN (LPWAN) carrier network by asking normal people to buy and operate network nodes for them. The hotspot may be purchased directly or bundled with 3rd party IOT products and become nodes in a proprietary LPWAN that mines tokens in a blockchain.

The post Helium – Venture Capital Con Job or Viable Business ? appeared first on EtherealMind.

Disposable $100 IoT satellites could swarm Earth’s orbit

Tiny cheap satellites, self-organizing and communicating as a group, could shift the internet of things (IoT) to space. The postage-stamp-sized devices, acting as sensors, just like the ones we see in traditional IoT networks could perform tasks such as mapping or studying Earth, say scientists involved in a recent successful launch of the disposable nanosatellites.The test satellites, essentially just sensors, were deployed in a batch in March. They captured data, communicated with one another, and then after a couple of days in orbit, as was planned, burned up as they reentered the atmosphere.[ IoT in the enterprise: Download a PDF bundle of five essential articles about IoT in the enterprise ] “This is like the PC revolution for space,” says Zac Manchester, an assistant professor at Stanford University, in an article on the school’s website. Manchester invented the ChipSats 10 years ago. It has taken until now, and after a failed attempt in 2014, to get the constellation operational—if just for those few days.To read this article in full, please click here

Cranky Old Network Engineer Complains About The Youth Of Today

If you’re very old (like me) you’ll likely remember the halcyon days when IP routing was not enabled by default on Cisco routers. Younger gamers may find this hard to believe, which makes it even stranger when I keep bumping into an apparently common misconception about how routers work. Let’s take a look at what I’m beefing about.

No IP Routing?

To put this in context for the younger gamers, it’s worth noting that at the time, a typical “enterprise” might be running IP, but was equally likely to run IPX, AppleTalk, DECnet or some other protocol which may – or may not – support routing. Yes, there was life before the Internet Protocol became ubiquitous. If you’re curious, the command to enable IP routing is, well:

ip routing

Guess how IPX routing was enabled:

ipx routing

Appletalk?

appletalk routing

DECnet Phase IV?

decnet [network-number] routing <decnet-address>

Ok, so the pattern isn’t entirely consistent, but it’s close enough. In one way things are much simpler now because routers tend to handle IP (and IPv6) and nothing else. On the other hand there are so many more IP-related features available, I think we should just be grateful that there’s only one Continue reading

The Quantum Menace

The Quantum Menace
The Quantum Menace

Over the last few decades, the word ‘quantum’ has become increasingly popular. It is common to find articles, reports, and many people interested in quantum mechanics and the new capabilities and improvements it brings to the scientific community. This topic not only concerns physics, since the development of quantum mechanics impacts on several other fields such as chemistry, economics, artificial intelligence, operations research, and undoubtedly, cryptography.

This post begins a trio of blogs describing the impact of quantum computing on cryptography, and how to use stronger algorithms resistant to the power of quantum computing.

  • This post introduces quantum computing and describes the main aspects of this new computing model and its devastating impact on security standards; it summarizes some approaches to securing information using quantum-resistant algorithms.
  • Due to the relevance of this matter, we present our experiments on a large-scale deployment of quantum-resistant algorithms.
  • Our third post introduces CIRCL, open-source Go library featuring optimized implementations of quantum-resistant algorithms and elliptic curve-based primitives.

All of this is part of Cloudflare’s Crypto Week 2019, now fasten your seatbelt and get ready to make a quantum leap.

What is Quantum Computing?

Back in 1981, Richard Feynman raised the question about what Continue reading