Hedge 113: The PLM with Jeff Jakab

Over the last few episodes of the Hedge, we’ve been talking to folks involved in bringing network products to market. In this episode, Tom Ammon and Russ White talk to Jeff Jakab about the role of the Product Line Manager in helping bring new networking products to life. Join us to understand the roles various people play in the vendor side of the world—both so you can understand the range of roles network engineers can play at a vendor, and so you can better understand how products are designed, developed, and deployed.

download

Quality is (too often) the missing ingredient

Software Eats the World?

I’m told software is going to eat the world very soon now. Everything already is, or will be, software based. To some folks, this sounds completely wonderful, but—leaving aside the privacy issues—I still see an elephant in the room with this vision of the future.

Quality.

Let me give you some recent examples.

First, ceiling fans. Modern ceiling fans, in case you didn’t know, don’t rely on the wall switch and pull chains. Instead, they rely on remote controls. This is brilliant—you can dim the light, change the speed of the fan, etc., from a remote control. No unsightly chains hanging from the ceiling.

Well, it’s brilliant so long as it works. I’ve replaced three of the four ceiling fans in my house. Two of the remote controls have somehow attached themselves to two of the three fans. It’s impossible to control one of the fans without also controlling the other. They sometimes get into this entertaining mode where turning one fan off turns the other one on.

For the third one—the one hanging from a 13-foot ceiling—the remote control sometimes operates one of the other fans, and sometimes the fan its supposed to operate. Continue reading

Weekend Reads 121721

Unfortunately, when engineers are entrusted with the task of delivering smooth video streaming to our users, we face numerous challenges from ‘last-mile’ wireless connections.

Exploit code has been released for a serious code-execution vulnerability in Log4j, an open source logging utility that’s used in countless apps, including those used by large enterprise organizations, several websites reported last Thursday.

The Tuesday outage at an Amazon Web Services data center affected services from several collaboration software vendors, highlighting how reliant companies have become on cloud providers for a variety of workplace tools.

Amazon.com Inc.’s ubiquitous cloud-computing network, the spine for a lot of digital communications and transactions across the U.S., went dark for several hours on Tuesday.

This is the hoarder’s mentality. “I can’t use this right now, but maybe I will some other time.”

More than 35,000 Java packages, amounting to over 8% of the Maven Central repository (the most significant Java package repository), have been impacted by the recently disclosed log4j vulnerabilities

So much for a quiet holiday season: CVE-2021-44228 (aka Log4Shell) may well be the most impactful vulnerability we’ve seen in years.

Cybersecurity researchers have demonstrated a new attack technique that makes it possible Continue reading

Hedge 112: The TME with Pete Lumbis

The Technical Marketing role is often misunderstood—or simply forgotten—in the vendor world. What does the TME do, and why? What value does the TME bring to the development and release of new products? Pete Lumbis joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the importance and value of the TME.

download

Controversial Reads 121021

In a highly anticipated decision, a judge of the United States International Trade Commission ruled in August that Google infringed five patents owned by speaker maker Sonos. The case charged Google with copying Sonos’ patented technology in its Google Home smart speakers.

If you’ve followed the news over the last few years, you’re probably convinced that we’re living in a golden age of conspiracy theories and disinformation.

Americans, and not just Americans, are well aware of how deep the dysfunction of the ruling factions runs. Many older ones remember the abuses of the Intelligence Community and the warnings against the Military-Industrial Complex; they have lived long enough to see the political resistance to the Community and the Complex shift, under pressure of deliberate policies, from the Left to the Right.

The rumors spread like wildfire: Muslims were secretly lacing a Sri Lankan village’s food with sterilization drugs. Soon, a video circulated that appeared to show a Muslim shopkeeper admitting to drugging his customers — he had misunderstood the question that was angrily put to him.

Antitrust has not had its moment since the 1911 breakup of Standard Oil. But this past year, policymakers and government leaders around the globe have Continue reading

Weekend Reads 121021

It is refreshing to find instances in the IT sector where competing groups with their own agendas work together for the common good and the improvement of systems everywhere. So it is with the absorption of the Gen-Z Consortium by the CXL Consortium.

What is open core? Is a project open core, or is a business open core? That’s debatable. Like open source, some view it as a development model, others view it as a business model.

From the recent writeup of the DNS work at the IETF its clear that there is a large amount of attention being focused on the DNS. It’s not just an IETF conversation, or a DNS OARC conversation, but a conversation that involves a considerable amount of research activity as well.

It seems like Antarctica’s McMurdo Station could be getting high-speed internet—a modern day luxury feature that could connect its remote laboratories (and seasonal tourist hub) to the rest of the world. The station is located on an island just off the northwestern part of the continent and is the largest US research hub on Antarctica.

“Your phone’s front camera is always securely looking for your face, even if you don’t touch it or Continue reading

Hedge 111: Machine Learning and Security with Micah Mussler

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are all the rage in the network engineering world. Where might these technologies be useful, as opposed to mere hype? The two most obvious areas where AI and ML would be useful are failure reaction and security. Micah Mussler joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the possibilities of using AI and/or ML in the broader security market—and focusing in on the network.

download

Weekend Reads 120321

SpaceX had filed a new application with the Federal Communications Commission for a smaller dish, which just received approval yesterday.

Threat actors are increasingly banking on the technique of HTML smuggling in phishing campaigns as a means to gain initial access and deploy an array of threats, including banking malware, remote administration trojans (RATs), and ransomware payloads.

IBM unveiled a 127-qubit quantum computing chip called Eagle this week, showing off a new asset in the race to build the most powerful quantum computer.

Insurers have halved the amount of cyber cover they provide to customers after the pandemic and home-working drove a surge in ransomware attacks that left them smarting from hefty payouts.

U.S. banking regulators on Thursday finalized a rule that directs banks to report any major cybersecurity incidents to the government within 36 hours of discovery.

After squandering its lead because of a half decade of problems modernizing its manufacturing, that’s where Intel has been headed.

General Motors (GM.N) aims to tackle the global semiconductor shortage with new designs built in North America, President Mark Reuss said on Thursday.

As telehealth and digital platforms cement their role in the post-pandemic future, it’s imperative for the digital Continue reading

Hedge 110: Andrew Alston and SRv6 Security

SRv6, a form of source routing, is the new and interesting method being created by the IETF to allow traffic engineering and traffic steering. This is not the first time the networking world has tried source routing, however—and in the spirit of rule 11, we should ask some questions. How and why did source routing fail last time? Have we learned those lessons and changed the way we’re doing things to overcome those limitations? Security seems to be one area where problems arise in the source routing paradigm.

Andrew Alston joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss security in SRv6.

download

Weekend Reads 111921

Kaspersky today publishes its Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Q3 2021 report, which found when compared to Q3 2020, the total number of DDoS attacks increased by nearly 24%, while the total number of smart attacks (advanced DDoS attacks that are often targeted) increased by 31% when compared to the same period last year.

IP fragmentation is a process that breaks large packets into smaller packets to allow them to more easily traverse a network. The process is common in the DNS, which is predominantly UDP based.

If you’ve been perusing cryptocurrency forums or video-game news recently—or spying everything from New York Times job listings to zany Twitter threads claiming that the traditional job interview is about to be replaced by blockchain-based “quests, adventures and courses to prove your worth”—you might have run into the term “Web3.”

When Facebook announced last month that it was rebranding as Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg enthusiastically described the metaverse his company would soon build, promising it would be a world “as detailed and convincing as this one” where “you’re going to be able to do almost anything you can imagine.”

In a previous blog, we shared how Paragon Pathfinder plays an important Continue reading

Hedge 109: Edward Lewis and the DNS Core

What is the “core” of the DNS system, and how has it changed across the years? Edward Lewis joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss his research into what the “core” of the domain name system is and how it has changed—including the rise of the large cloud players to the core of the default free zone.

download

Upcoming Webinar: How the Internet Really Works (Part 1)

This live training will provide an overview of the systems, providers, and standards bodies important to the operation of the global Internet, including the Domain Name System (DNS), the routing and transport systems, standards bodies, and registrars. For DNS, the process of a query will be considered in some detail, who pays for each server used in the resolution process, and tools engineers can use to interact DNS. For routing and transport, the role of each kind of provider will be considered, along with how they make money to cover their costs, and how engineers can interact with the global routing table (the Default Free Zone, of DFZ). Finally, registrars and standards bodies will be considered, including their organizational structure, how they generate revenue, and how to find their standards.

Thoughts on Auto Disaggregation and Complexity

Way in the past, the EIGRP team (including me) had an interesting idea–why not aggregate routes automatically as much as possible, along classless bounds, and then deaggregate routes when we could detect some failure was causing a routing black hole? To understand this concept better, consider the network below.

In this network, B and C are connected to four different routers, each of which is advertising a different subnet. In turn, B and C are aggregating these four routes into 2001:db8:3e8:10::/60, and advertising this aggregate towards A. From a control plane state perspective, this is a major win. The obvious gain is that the amount of state is reduced from four routes to one. The less obvious gain is A doesn’t need to know about any changes in the state for the four destinations aggregated into the /60. Depending on how often these links change state, the reduction in the rate of change is, perhaps, more important than the reduction in the amount of control plane state.

We always know there will be a tradeoff when reducing state; what is the tradeoff here? If C somehow loses its connection to one of the four routers, say the router advertising 11::/64, Continue reading

Weekend Reads 111221

We’ve had too many face-palm-worthy incidents of organizations hearing “hey, I found your data in a world readable S3 bucket” or finding a supposedly “test” server exposed that had production data in it.

Virtually all compilers — programs that transform human-readable source code into computer-executable machine code — are vulnerable to an insidious attack in which an adversary can introduce targeted vulnerabilities into any software without being detected, new research released today warns.

2021 has already been a banner year for cybercriminals — the record-largest ransomware payment of $40 million was made by an insurance company this year. And the attacks won’t stop.

In the 2021 Domain Security Report, we analyzed the trend of domain security adoption with respect to the type of domain registrar used, and found that 57% of Global 2000 organizations use consumer-grade registrars with limited protection against domain and DNS hijacking, distributed denial of service (DDoS), man-in-the-middle attacks (MitM), or DNS cache poisoning.

When it comes to cybersecurity, risks are omnipresent. Whether it is a bank dealing with financial transactions or medical providers handling the personal data of patients, cybersecurity threats are unavoidable. The only way to efficiently combat these threats is to understand them.

‘Functional, Continue reading

Hedge 108: In Defense of Boring Technology with Andrew Wertkin

Engineers (and marketing folks) love new technology. Watching an engineer learn or unwrap some new technology is like watching a dog chase a squirrel—the point is not to catch the squirrel, it’s just that the chase is really fun. Join Andrew Wertkin (from BlueCat Networks), Tom Ammon, and Russ White as we discuss the importance of simple, boring technologies, and moderating our love of the new.

download

Live Webinar: How Routers Really Work

This Friday (the 12th) I’m presenting a live webinar on How Routers Really Work over at Pearson. From the description:

This training will peer into the internal components of a router, starting with an explanation of how a router switches packets. This walk through of a switching path, in turn, will be used as a foundation for explaining the components of a router, including the various tables used to build forwarding tables and the software components used to build these tables.

Please join me by registering here.

I’ve changed just a few of the slides from the last time I gave this talk and reordered some things.

Weekend Reads 110521

From Facebook to LinkedIn to Indeed, ads are popping up that promise well-paying jobs — if applicants provide their Social Security numbers and other details up front. Scammers then use the information to apply for unemployment benefits.

The coronavirus pandemic giveth to Amazon retail business and its Amazon Web Services cloud business, and the pandemic taketh away from the Amazon retail business.

Companies should recognize that collaboration platforms aren’t isolated, secure channels where traditional threats don’t exist.

The Federal Aviation Administration said on Tuesday it had issued a special information bulletin alerting manufacturers, operators, and pilots that action may be needed to address potential interference with sensitive aircraft electronics caused by the use of 5G telecommunications technology.

The holiday shopping season always means big business for phishers, who tend to find increased success this time of year with a lure about a wayward package that needs redelivery.

If not handled in time, the attacks can lead to IP reputation loss and blocklisting, causing severe and expensive damage to companies, but a few precautionary steps can help keep the threats at bay.

The following resources and tutorials will enhance your understanding of container network security and help you get started.

With Continue reading

Hedge 107: Career Advice with Terry Slattery

Whether you’re just starting in your technology career, or you’re an old hand who likes to go back to basics and understand how to move forward in your career, this episode of the Hedge is for you. Terry Slattery joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the things you can do to build a successful career as in the world of network engineering.

download

Weekend Reads 102921

If your organization includes Android devices as part of its bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy or uses embedded systems, then a recent root expiration for Let’s Encrypt digital certificates may potentially place your organization at risk.

In a threat hunting approach, when we find some malicious file, binary, or a program, we need to collect the artifacts from them and search within our whole environment to find any possible traces of malicious activity.

In other words, how to fool advanced threat detection systems, past the all-seeing eye of which, according to marketers, no extra byte can slip through. I am talking about systems that use big data analytics as one of the main tools for detecting suspicious activity like SIEM and XDR.

Intel Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud on Wednesday said they have worked together to create a new category of chip that Intel hopes will become a major seller in the booming cloud computing market.

Attacks involving SEO poisoning — where adversaries artificially increase the search engine ranking of websites hosting their malware to lure potential victims — are on the rise.

The National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have published cybersecurity guidance Continue reading

Master Class: Resilience in Large-Scale Fabrics

In the aftermath of a major network outage, the natural reaction of most network engineers is to find some way to avoid all future outages—regardless of the cost. The first line of defense against is future outages is redundancy, whether in the form of additional parallel links, new routers, new firewalls, new … whatever, so long as there is more of it so packets have more paths to make it from source to destination.

Please join me for this live webinar.