Worth Reading: Standardized Models For Networking

From an operator’s perspective, one challenge with network automation is the lack of standard interfaces. In other words, it’s hard to configure a network programmatically if the details vary from device to device. Today, most operators know these differences in the form of CLI syntax. For example, the commands required to configure BGP on a Cisco device running IOS differ from the commands required to accomplish the same task on a Juniper device running Junos. -via packet pushers

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Securing BGP: A Case Study (2)

In part 1 of this series, I pointed out that there are three interesting questions we can ask about BGP security. The third question I outlined there was this: What is it we can actually prove in a packet switched network? This is the first question I want dive in too—this is a deep dive, so be prepared for a long series. This question feels like it is actually asking three different things, what we might call “subquestions,” or perhaps “supporting points.” These three questions are:

• If I send a packet to the peer I received this update from, will it actually reach the advertised destination?
• If I send this information to this destination, will it actually reach the intended recipient?
• If I send a packet to the peer I received this update from, will it pass through an adversary who is redirecting the traffic so they can observe it?

These are the things I can try to prove, or would like to know, in a packet switched network. Note that I want to intentionally focus on the data plane and then transfer these questions to the control plane (BGP). This is the crucial point to remember: If I Continue reading

Worth Reading: Inside the Internet Archive

To most of the web surfing public, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is the face of the Archive’s web archiving activities. Via a simple interface, anyone can type in a URL and see how it has changed over the last 20 years. Yet, behind that simple search box lies an exquisitely complex assemblage of datasets and partners that make possible the Archive’s vast repository of the web. How does the Archive really work, what does its crawl workflow look like, how does it handle issues like robots.txt, and what can all of this teach us about the future of web archiving? -via forbes

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Beunos Aires at Night

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Worth Reading: History as big data

What would it look like to reimagine the book not as pages of text, but as a global distributed gallery of illustrations, drawings, charts, maps, and photographs that together comprise one of the world’s greatest art collections? -via forbes

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Worth Reading: IPv6 address allocation on hosts

The breadth of address allocation options available in IPv6 world confuses many engineers thoroughly fluent in IPv4, but it also gives operating system developers way too many options… and it turns out that different operating systems behave way differently when faced with the same environment. -via ivan

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Technology ‘net: End-to-end Disaggregation?

Quite a lot seems to be going on on the technology side of things—as the morning paper points out, everything seems to be changing at once right now. Ever feel like you’re sipping from a firehose? Maybe there’s a reason… Let’s discuss just a few of these in a little more detail.

First, there has been a lot of discussion around IPv6 in the last year or so. The folks within the IETF who designed IPv6 decided to do “more than just” adding more address space, instead deciding to change some fundamental things about the way IP works in the process of developing a new protocol. For instance, fragmentation by network devices is gone in IPv6, and the option headers are much richer. These kind of fundamental changes in protocol design invariably lead to the question—what impact do these things have on performance? A recent series of tests set out to answer this question. The results are pretty clear; over time, as IPv6 has been deployed natively, the protocol’s performance has moved closer to the performance of IPv4. There are still some gaps, but they are narrowing. Those gaps may never be gone, but IPv6 may come close enough, over Continue reading

Worth Reading: Intel becomes irrelevant

We’re approaching the end of the closed, proprietary, single source technology era. ARM processors are freely licensed, more open, and much more cost competitive than similar products from Intel or AMD. If you need 10 million chips for your next product do you buy them from Intel? Or do you get a license from ARM and hire a foundry to make them for you? -va cringely

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Security ‘net: Digital Copyright Edition

The world of digital copyright is somewhat tangential to “real” security, but it’s a culture issue that impacts every network engineer in myriad ways. For instance, suppose you buy a small home router, and then decide you really want to run your own software on it. For instance, let’s say you really want to build your own router because you know what you can build will outperform what’s commercially available (which, by the way, it will). But rather than using an off box wireless adapter, like the folks at ARS, you really want to have the wireless on board.

Believe it or not, this would be considered, by some folks, as a pretty large act of copyright infringement. For instance, the hardware manufacturer may object to you replacing their software. Or the FCC or some other regulatory agency might even object because they think you’re trying to hog wireless spectrum, or because you don’t like what the wireless providers are doing. The EFF has a good piece up arguing that just such tinkering as replacing the operating system on a commercially purchased device is at the heart of digital freedom.

One of the most crucial issues in the fight for Continue reading

Worth Reading: Light at the end of the silicon

Silicon photonics has emerged as one of those areas of such far-reaching potential that its challenges and benefits tend to be clouded in generalities. Light as the main medium does indeed promise to alter fields including biological and chemical sensing, navigation, radio frequency sensing, communications, but for our purposes here, the potential within large-scale computing is of greater interest. -via the next platform

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Securing BGP: A Case Study (1)

What would it take to secure BGP? Let’s begin where any engineering problem should begin: what problem are we trying to solve?

In this network—in any collection of BGP autonomous systems—there are three sorts of problems that can occur at the AS level. For the purposes of this explanation, assume AS65000 is advertising 2001:db8:0:1::/64. While I’ve covered this ground before, it’s still useful to outline them:

1. AS65001 could advertise 2001:db8:0:1::/64 as if it is locally attached. This is considered a false origination, or a hijacked route.
2. AS65001 could advertise a route to 2001:db8:0:1::/64 with the AS path [65000,65001] to AS65003. This is another form of route hijacking, but instead of a direct hijack it’s a “one behind” attack. AS65001 doesn’t pretend to own the route in question, but rather to be connected to the AS that is originating the route.
3. AS65000 could consider AS65003 a customer, or rather AS65003 might be purchasing Internet connectivity from AS65000. This would mean that any routes AS65000 advertises to AS65003 are not intended to be retransmitted back to AS65004. If, for instance, 2001:db8:0:1::/64, is advertised by AS65000 to AS65003, and AS65003 readvertises it to AS65004, AS65003 would be an unintentional transit AS in the Continue reading

Worth Reading: Net Neutrality

The world is watching and taking note of the FCC’s blatant competition double standard that totally favors America’s dominant edge platforms above most everyone and everything else. Consider an apt and illuminating comparison between the competition U.S. wireless broadband providers face versus the competition Silicon Valley’s edge platforms face. -via somewhat reasonable

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Oak Island Shell

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Worth Reading: ARM

ARM announced the Cortex-A72, the high-end successor to the Cortex-A57, near the beginning of 2015. For more than a year now, SoC vendors have been working on integrating the new CPU core into their products. Now that mobile devices using the A72 are imminent, it’s a good time to discuss what makes ARM’s flagship CPU tick. -via tom’s hardware

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QOTW: Don’t keep your eye on the clock

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Worth Reading: The IETF turns 30

30 years ago, on the 16th and the 17th of January 1986, a meeting of the so-called DoD Gateway Algorithms Task Force took place in San Diego, California. During that meeting a charter for an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was proposed. via the isoc

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Honest WiFi

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Security ‘net: A few keystrokes down the slippery slope

A situation you could really face:

Suppose a laptop were found at the apartment of one of the perpetrators of last year’s Paris attacks. It’s searched by the authorities pursuant to a warrant, and they find a file on the laptop that’s a set of instructions for carrying out the attacks. The discovery would surely help in the prosecution of the laptop’s owner, tying him to the crime. But a junior prosecutor has a further idea. The private document was likely shared among other conspirators, some of whom are still on the run or unknown entirely. Surely Google has the ability to run a search of all Gmail inboxes, outboxes, and message drafts folders, plus Google Drive cloud storage, to see if any of its 900 million users are currently in possession of that exact document. If Google could be persuaded or ordered to run the search, it could generate a list of only those Google accounts possessing the precise file — and all other Google users would remain undisturbed, except for the briefest of computerized “touches” on their accounts to see if the file reposed there. -just security

Would you run this search? It’s a difficult question, but ultimately Continue reading

Worth Reading: Learning QoS from RFCs

This is one of the neat things about IETF documents: while many of them are, in fact, bare descriptions of a packet format, a processing mechanism, or something similar, you can often find sets of RFCs and drafts that not only provide a solid overview of an entire area, but even give you a good set of reading material to dig deeper into the topic. -via packet pushers

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Highlight: ArtArch

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