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Category Archives for "Russ White"

Weekend Reads 05042018: It’s time to opt in to security

Start with your business goals and decide which metrics are required to accurately measure the state of these goals. For example, say an ISP wishes to ensure that their subscribers get the best performance possible during peak usage time — this can be monitored by measuring the oversubscription ratio and uplink utilization of the terminating device. The required metrics to do this are the number of connected sessions, ifHCInOctets, ifHCOutOctets, ifHCSpeed of the uplink from the terminating device. —Tim Raphael @APNIC

What is the best threat management system for a business network? It’s a difficult question to answer because threat management isn’t about finding a single solution to every problem; it’s about layering multiple solutions in a way that offers the best protection against a variety of threats. —Diana Shtil @Dark Reading

Tomorrow, the House Judiciary Committee will host what’s likely to be a wide-ranging discussion of how social media companies moderate content, in its hearing on Filtering Practices of Social Media Platforms. While the hearing is sure to include some spectacle and grandstanding, make no mistake: This is a deeply serious issue that deserves thoughtful consideration by policymakers, companies, and users alike. Here are a few key themes we Continue reading

Worth Reading: Automatically detecting peering infrastructure outages

Given the high concentration of interconnections, the uptime of peering infrastructures is crucial for overlay Internet applications. Facilities and IXPs strive to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) of ‘five nines’ (five minutes downtime per year), and ‘four nines’ (50 minutes downtime per year). However, outages still occur due to power failures, human errors, attacks, and natural disasters. —Vasileios Giotsas @APNIC

The Universal Fat Tree

Have you ever wondered why spine-and-leaf networks are the “standard” for data center networks? While the answer has a lot to do with trial and error, it turns out there is also a mathematical reason the fat-tree spine-and-leaf is is used almost universally. There often is some mathematical reason for the decisions made in engineering, although we rarely explore those reasons. If it seems to work, there is probably a reason.

The fat-tree design is explored in a paper published in 2015 (available here at the ACM, and now added to my “classic papers” page so there is a local copy as well), using a novel technique to not only explore why the spine-and-leaf fat-tree is so flexible, but even what the ideal ratio of network capacity is at each stage. The idea begins with this basic concept: one kind of network topology can be emulated on top of another physical topology. For instance, you can emulate a toroid topology on top of a hierarchical network, or a spine-and-leaf on top of of hypercube, etc. To use terms engineers are familiar with in a slightly different way, let’s call the physical topology the underlay, and the emulated topology the overlay. Continue reading

Weekend Reads 042718: Mostly Security and Privacy

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) launched the Uniform Rapid Suspension System (URS) (2013) in anticipation of the marketing of new gTLDs that became available from November 2013. It is one of four new rights protection mechanisms (RPMs) designed to combat cybersquatting. —Gerald M. Levine @CircleID

Digital attackers are targeting organizations in the energy sector like never before. For example, just a few weeks ago, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a joint report describing a massive Russian hacking campaign to infiltrate America’s critical infrastructure. In a first, the US government publicly blamed Russia’s government for attacks on energy infrastructure. —Ray Lepina @tripwire

About a decade ago, Kaminsky proved that vulnerabilities of the DNS can be exploited. If the DNS is corrupt (for instance by ‘cache poisoning’), the end user can be directed to a malicious website. This can be risky when sensitive (personal) information is exchanged, or a financial transaction is done. Mail security is also tied to (the security of) the DNS. A network attacker can spoof the DNS records of a mail server, to redirect mail connections to a malicious server. —Rene Bakker @APNIC

When we must depend on a system, not Continue reading

On the Web: Openfabric at IPspace

I was over at ipspace to talk to Ivan and several other folks about openfabric. This is one of those situations where… Well, the algorithm openfabric uses to calculate fabric location has changed slightly in the last week. Welcome to the world of networking technology. ?

As always, we started with the “what’s wrong with what we have right now, like using BGP as a better IGP” question, resulting in “BGP is becoming the trash can of the Internet”. You can probably guess the next set of intro questions: “Do we need policies and traffic engineering in a high-speed data center fabric?” Finally, we got to discussing OpenFabric, starting with how OpenFabric uses link-state database to modify IS-IS flooding behavior and thus reduces the total amount of flooding in a data center fabric. Next step: how do you know where it’s safe to reduce flooding? You have to figure out whether you’re a leaf or spine, and there are two ways in OpenFabric to solve that challenge.

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