Worth Reading: The hidden world of news cameras

Most professional photographers are familiar with the fact that their cameras embed a wealth of metadata hidden in the images they create in formats like EXIF, IPTC and XMP. This metadata typically records the camera, lens and flash settings used to create the photograph, reflecting whether the image is a close-up macro portrait or a distant zoom lens shot. Yet, the fields can also contain textual descriptions of the image written by the photographer, authorship information, subject keywords, GPS coordinates, the names of public figures and events depicted in the image and a myriad other pieces of information that allow the image to be easily cataloged and searched. —Forbes

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Worth Reading: IPv6 and the DNS

The exhortations about the Internet’s prolonged transition to version 6 of the Internet Protocol continue, although after some two decades the intensity of the rhetoric has faded and, possibly surprisingly, it has been replaced by action in some notable parts of the Internet. But how do we know there is action? How can we tell whether, and where, IPv6 is being deployed in today’s Internet? —Potaroo

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Reaction: DevOps and Security

Over at TechBeacon, my friend Chris Romeo has an article up about DevOps and security. It’s interesting to me because this is actually an area I’d never thought about before, even though it makes sense. Given DevOps is essentially writing software to control infrastructure (like routers, compute, and storage), and software needs to be written in a way that is secure, then it should be obvious that DevOps software should be developed with good security principles gleaned from software development as part of the foundation.

And here we face a challenge, as Chris says—

There is no standard that defines security for DevOps, and the chances of a standard ever developing is small because different organizations are doing things their own way, and can’t even agree on a standard name. And while there is a standard for the secure development lifecycle (ISO/IEC 27034-1), few organizations are ever validated against it.

The key point in here is that every organization is doing things their own way. This isn’t wrong, of course, because every organization must have some “snowflakiness” to justify its existence, and that “snowflakiness” is often likely to show up, in a large way, in something like handling resources within Continue reading

Worth Reading: Microsoft and FPGAs

Microsoft’s embrace of programmable chips knowns as FPGAs is well documented. But in a paper released Monday the software and cloud company provided a look into how it has fundamentally changed the economics of delivering hardware as a service thanks to these once-specialty pieces of silicon. —The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: Some notes on today’s DDoS

As a techy, I want to know the composition of the traffic. Is it blindly overflowing incoming links with junk traffic? Or is it cleverly sending valid DNS requests, overloading the ability of servers to respond, and overflowing outgoing link (as responses are five times or more as big as requests). Such techy details and more make a big difference. Was Dyn the only target? Why were non-Dyn customers effected? —Errata Security

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I2RS and Remote Triggered Black Holes

In our last post, we looked at how I2RS is useful for managing elephant flows on a data center fabric. In this post, I want to cover a use case for I2RS that is outside the data center, along the network edge—remote triggered black holes (RTBH). Rather than looking directly at the I2RS use case, however, it’s better to begin by looking at the process for creating, and triggering, RTBH using “plain” BGP. Assume we have the small network illustrated below—

In this network, we’d like to be able to trigger B and C to drop traffic sourced from 2001:db8:3e8:101::/64 inbound into our network (the cloudy part). To do this, we need a triggering router—we’ll use A—and some configuration on the two edge routers—B and C. We’ll assume B and C have up and running eBGP sessions to D and E, which are located in another AS. We’ll begin with the edge devices, as the configuration on these devices provides the setup for the trigger. On B and C, we must configure—

• Unicast RPF; loose mode is okay. With loose RPF enabled, any route sourced from an address that is pointing to a null destination in the routing table will Continue reading

Worth Reading: Hack Cameras, DVRs, and DDoS

A massive and sustained Internet attack that has caused outages and network congestion today for a large number of Web sites was launched with the help of hacked “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices, such as CCTV video cameras and digital video recorders, new data suggests. —Krebs on Security

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Worth Reading: Facebook’s video views

The takeaway from Facebook’s bombshell that it had overstated a key measure of video ad viewership on its pages by about 80%: It’s not that the social-media giant “miscalculated” its numbers. It’s a fresh view into Facebook’s arrogance, both toward its advertisers and its nearly two billion users. Nothing’s new under the sun, of course — pride has goeth-ed before a fall for all of human history. And obviously does in the digital sphere, too: Facebook FB, +0.05% and its principal digital advertising rival, Google GOOG, +0.04% have been behaving as though customs and principles that have governed the advertising business for its entire history simply don’t apply to them. —Market Watch

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Butterfly

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Worth Reading: The psychology of bad passwords

A Lab42 survey, which polled consumers across the United States, Germany, France, New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom, highlights the psychology around why consumers develop poor password habits despite understanding the obvious risk, and suggests that there is a level of cognitive dissonance around our online habits. —helpnetsecurity

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Worth Reading: Increasing the strength of the root zone

A few weeks ago, on Oct. 1, 2016, Verisign successfully doubled the size of the cryptographic key that generates Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) signatures for the internet’s root zone. With this change, root zone Domain Name System (DNS) responses can be fully validated using 2048-bit RSA keys. This project involved work by numerous people within Verisign, as well as collaborations with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). —Circle ID

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Worth Reading: What the IoT means to you

In the broadest possible terms, the Internet of Things is the connectivity of things that are able to communicate data about themselves to the “network” or to be controlled from the network. This means that the Internet of Things is as nebulous, ubiquitous and diverse as the internet itself, examples of IoT devices could range from the iKettle to devices use sophisticated monitoring of HD video to support mission critical applications like traffic flow management. —ECI

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Worth Reading: The balancing act of freelancing

By the end of the work day, the last thing you want to do is look at another pixel. Since 8:30am, you’ve been firing on all cylinders. Deadlines, meetings and requests have been swarming your desk as restlessly as your fingers against your keys. The mental expenditure you endure each day is taxing. Yet, you’re not done. You have even more deadlines, calls, meetings and requests to honor once you get home–your place of solitude. They belong to your freelance clients. You must pay them the same amount of attention and focus as you give to your day job. —Line 25

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Thoughts on the Tomahawk II

Broadcom released some information about the new Tomahawk II chip last week in a press release. For those who follow hardware, there are some interesting points worth considering here.

First, the chip supports 256x25g SERDES. Each pair of 25G SERDES can be combined into a single 50g port, allowing the switch to support 128 50g ports. Sets of four SERDES can be combined into a single 100g port, allowing the switch to support 64 100g ports.

Second, there is some question about the table sizes in this new chip. The press release notes the chip has “Increased On-Chip Forwarding Databases,” but doesn’t give any precise information. Information from vendors who wrap sheet metal around the chipset to build a complete box don’t seem to be too forthcoming in their information about this aspect of the new chip, either. The Tomahawk line has long had issues with its nominal 100,000 forwarding table entry limit, particularly in large scale data center fabrics and applications such as IX fabrics. We’ll simply have to wait to find out more about this aspect of the new chip, it seems.

Third, there is some question about the forwarding buffers available on the chip. Again, the Tomahawk Continue reading

Worth Reading: The EU is pushing new IoT security rules

The European Commission is drafting new cybersecurity requirements to beef up security around so-called Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as Web-connected security cameras, routers and digital video recorders (DVRs). News of the expected proposal comes as security firms are warning that a great many IoT devices are equipped with little or no security protections. iotb2According to a report at Euractiv.com, the Commission is planning the new IoT rules as part of a new plan to overhaul the European Union’s telecommunications laws. “The Commission would encourage companies to come up with a labeling system for internet-connected devices that are approved and secure,” wrote Catherine Stupp. “The EU labelling system that rates appliances based on how much energy they consume could be a template for the cybersecurity ratings.” —Krebs on Security

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Worth Reading: Flowspec is a step forward

Do you recall when service providers typically had to call upon Remote Trigger Blackhole (RTBH) to mitigate DDOS attacks? With RTBH, we only had two methods, source-based and destination-based. We would basically take the hardest approach. Either drop all traffic from the source or drop all traffic to the destination. This could be both wanted and unwanted traffic. —Netcraftsmen

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On the ‘net: Software Patents

What should we do with software patents? I’ve seen both sides of the debate, as I work a great deal in the context of standards bodies (particularly the IETF), where software patents have impeded progress on a community-driven (and/or community-usable) standard. On the other hand, I have been listed as a co-inventor on at least 40 software patents across more than twenty years of work, and have a number of software patents either filed or in the process of being filed. —CircleID

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Worth Reading: The Overlapping Birthday Problem

How many arbitrary people do you have to get into a room before two of them share the same birthday? Probability theory has considered this problem for so long that no one is quite certain who first posed the so-called “birthday problem” or “birthday paradox.” What we do know is that this occurs with many fewer people than we might have guessed. In fact, there’s a 50% chance that two people will share a birthday (month and date) with only 23 people. That confidence goes up to 99% with 75 people. Beyond just awkward situations about who gets the first slice of cake, this idea has applications in cryptography and security situations. The short of the idea is that things that seem unpredictable or unlikely are often much more likely than we would think. —Cloud Security Alliance

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Worth Reading: MANRs gains steam

The Internet Society’s Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS), which launched nearly two years ago as a plan for advancing the security and resilience of the Net’s routing infrastructure, has signed up network operators in Asia, North and South America, Africa, and Europe, including six network providers from Russia, five in the Netherlands, five in the US, and four in Germany. AT&T, Comcast, and Level 3, are among the largest US ISPs that have joined the effort. —Dark Reading

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Fabric versus Network: What’s the Difference?

We often hear about fabrics, and we often hear about networks—but on paper, an in practice, they often seem to be the same thing. Leaving aside the many realms of vendor hype, what’s really the difference? Poking around on the ‘net, I came across a couple of definitions that seemed useful, at least at first blush. For instance, SDN Search gives provides the following insight—

The word fabric is used as a metaphor to illustrate the idea that if someone were to document network components and their relationships on paper, the lines would weave back and forth so densely that the diagram would resemble a woven piece of cloth.

While this is interesting, it gives us more of a “on the paper” answer than what might be called a functional view. The entry at Wikipedia is more operationally based—

Switched Fabric or switching fabric is a network topology in which network nodes interconnect via one or more network switches (particularly crossbar switches). Because a switched fabric network spreads network traffic across multiple physical links, it yields higher total throughput than broadcast networks, such as early Ethernet.

Greg has an interesting (though older) post up on the topic, Continue reading