DS620slim tiny home server
That's right, laptop 2.5 inch drives. It makes this a tiny server that you can hold in your hand.
The purpose of a NAS is reliable storage. All disk drives eventually fail. If you stick a USB external drive on your desktop for backups, it'll eventually crash, losing any data on it. A failure is unlikely tomorrow, but a spinning disk will almost certainly fail some time in the next 10 years. If you want to keep things, like photos, for the rest of your life, you need to do something different.
The solution is RAID, an array of redundant disks such that when one fails (or even two), you don't lose any data. You simply buy a new disk to replace the failed one and keep going. With occasional replacements (as failures happen) it can last decades. My older NAS is 10 years old and I've replaced all Continue reading
Reading: The Case for a Mostly Open Internet
This post originally appeared on the Packet Pushers’ Ignition site on January 14, 2020. There is a slow but steady trend for Governements’ to take back control of internet in their countries. For China the “great firewall” is now a rigid access control on content. Russia has been progressing changes to to be isolate itself […]
The post Reading: The Case for a Mostly Open Internet appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Live-patching security vulnerabilities inside the Linux kernel with eBPF Linux Security Module
Linux Security Modules (LSM) is a hook-based framework for implementing security policies and Mandatory Access Control in the Linux kernel. Until recently users looking to implement a security policy had just two options. Configure an existing LSM module such as AppArmor or SELinux, or write a custom kernel module.
Linux 5.7 introduced a third way: LSM extended Berkeley Packet Filters (eBPF) (LSM BPF for short). LSM BPF allows developers to write granular policies without configuration or loading a kernel module. LSM BPF programs are verified on load, and then executed when an LSM hook is reached in a call path.
Let’s solve a real-world problem
Modern operating systems provide facilities allowing "partitioning" of kernel resources. For example FreeBSD has "jails", Solaris has "zones". Linux is different - it provides a set of seemingly independent facilities each allowing isolation of a specific resource. These are called "namespaces" and have been growing in the kernel for years. They are the base of popular tools like Docker, lxc or firejail. Many of the namespaces are uncontroversial, like the UTS namespace which allows the host system to hide its hostname and time. Others are complex but straightforward - NET and NS (mount) namespaces Continue reading
How Cloudflare Security does Zero Trust
Throughout Cloudflare One week, we provided playbooks on how to replace your legacy appliances with Zero Trust services. Using our own products is part of our team’s culture, and we want to share our experiences when we implemented Zero Trust.
Our journey was similar to many of our customers. Not only did we want better security solutions, but the tools we were using made our work more difficult than it needed to be. This started with just a search for an alternative to remotely connecting on a clunky VPN, but soon we were deploying Zero Trust solutions to protect our employees’ web browsing and email. Next, we are looking forward to upgrading our SaaS security with our new CASB product.
We know that getting started with Zero Trust can seem daunting, so we hope that you can learn from our own journey and see how it benefited us.
Replacing a VPN: launching Cloudflare Access
Back in 2015, all of Cloudflare’s internally-hosted applications were reached via a hardware-based VPN. On-call engineers would fire up a client on their laptop, connect to the VPN, and log on to Grafana. This process was frustrating and slow.
Many of the products we build are Continue reading
Kubectl with Cloudflare Zero Trust
Cloudflare is a heavy user of Kubernetes for engineering workloads: it's used to power the backend of our APIs, to handle batch-processing such as analytics aggregation and bot detection, and engineering tools such as our CI/CD pipelines. But between load balancers, API servers, etcd, ingresses, and pods, the surface area exposed by Kubernetes can be rather large.
In this post, we share a little bit about how our engineering team dogfoods Cloudflare Zero Trust to secure Kubernetes — and enables kubectl without proxies.
Our General Approach to Kubernetes Security
As part of our security measures, we heavily limit what can access our clusters over the network. Where a network service is exposed, we add additional protections, such as requiring Cloudflare Access authentication or Mutual TLS (or both) to access ingress resources.
These network restrictions include access to the cluster's API server. Without access to this, engineers at Cloudflare would not be able to use tools like kubectl to introspect their team's resources. While we believe Continuous Deployments and GitOps are best practices, allowing developers to use the Kubernetes API aids in troubleshooting and increasing developer velocity. Not having access would have been a deal breaker.
To satisfy our security requirements, Continue reading
Decommissioning your VDI
This blog offers Cloudflare’s perspective on how remote browser isolation can help organizations offload internal web application use cases currently secured by virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). VDI has historically been useful to secure remote work, particularly when users relied on desktop applications. However, as web-based apps have become more popular than desktop apps, the drawbacks of VDI – high costs, unresponsive user experience, and complexity – have become harder to ignore. In response, we offer practical recommendations and a phased approach to transition away from VDI, so that organizations can lower cost and unlock productivity by improving employee experiences and simplifying administrative overhead.
Modern Virtual Desktop usage
Background on Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure describes running desktop environments on virtual computers hosted in a data center. When users access resources within VDI, video streams from those virtual desktops are delivered securely to endpoint devices over a network. Today, VDI is predominantly hosted on-premise in data centers and either managed directly by organizations themselves or by third-party Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) providers. In spite of web application usage growing in favor of desktop applications, DaaS is growing, with Gartner® recently projecting DaaS spending to double by 2024.
Both flavors of VDI Continue reading
Verify Apple devices with no installed software
One of the foundations of Zero Trust is determining if a user’s device is “healthy” — that it has its operating system up-to-date with the latest security patches, that it’s not jailbroken, that it doesn’t have malware installed, and so on. Traditionally, determining this has required installing software directly onto a user’s device.
Earlier this month, Cloudflare participated in the announcement of an open source standard called a Private Attestation Token. Device manufacturers who support the standard can now supply a Private Attestation Token with any request made by one of their devices. On the IT Administration side, Private Attestation Tokens means that security teams can verify a user’s device before they access a sensitive application — without the need to install any software or collect a user’s device data.
At WWDC 2022, Apple announced Private Attestation Tokens. Today, we’re announcing that Cloudflare Access will support verifying a Private Attestation token. This means that security teams that rely on Cloudflare Access can verify a user’s Apple device before they access a sensitive application — no additional software required.
Determining a “healthy” device
There are many solutions on the market that help security teams determine if a device is “healthy” and Continue reading
Area 1 threat indicators now available in Cloudflare Zero Trust
Over the last several years, both Area 1 and Cloudflare built pipelines for ingesting threat indicator data, for use within our products. During the acquisition process we compared notes, and we discovered that the overlap of indicators between our two respective systems was smaller than we expected. This presented us with an opportunity: as one of our first tasks in bringing the two companies together, we have started bringing Area 1’s threat indicator data into the Cloudflare suite of products. This means that all the products today that use indicator data from Cloudflare’s own pipeline now get the benefit of Area 1’s data, too.
Area 1 built a data pipeline focused on identifying new and active phishing threats, which now supplements the Phishing category available today in Gateway. If you have a policy that references this category, you’re already benefiting from this additional threat coverage.
How Cloudflare identifies potential phishing threats
Cloudflare is able to combine the data, procedures and techniques developed independently by both the Cloudflare team and the Area 1 team prior to acquisition. Customers are able to benefit from the work of both teams across the suite of Cloudflare products.
Cloudflare curates a set of data feeds Continue reading
Video: IPv6 RA Guard and Extension Headers
Last week’s IPv6 security video introduced the rogue IPv6 RA challenges and the usual countermeasure – RA guard. Unfortunately, IPv6 tends to be a wonderfully extensible protocol, creating all sorts of opportunities for nefarious actors and security researchers.
For years, the networking vendors were furiously trying to plug the holes created by the academically minded IPv6 designers in love with fragmented extension headers. In the meantime, security researches had absolutely no problem finding yet another weird combination of IPv6 headers that would bypass any IPv6 RA guard implementation until IETF gave up and admitted one cannot have “infinitely extensible” and “secure” in the same sentence.
For more details watch the video by Christopher Werny describing how one could use IPv6 extension headers to circumvent IPv6 RA guard
You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video.
Cloudflare mitigates 26 million request per second DDoS attack
Last week, Cloudflare automatically detected and mitigated a 26 million request per second DDoS attack — the largest HTTPS DDoS attack on record.
The attack targeted a customer website using Cloudflare’s Free plan. Similar to the previous 15M rps attack, this attack also originated mostly from Cloud Service Providers as opposed to Residential Internet Service Providers, indicating the use of hijacked virtual machines and powerful servers to generate the attack — as opposed to much weaker Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Record-breaking attacks
Over the past year, we’ve witnessed one record-breaking attack after the other. Back in August 2021, we disclosed a 17.2M rps HTTP DDoS attack, and more recently in April, a 15M rps HTTPS DDoS attack. All were automatically detected and mitigated by our HTTP DDoS Managed Ruleset which is powered by our autonomous edge DDoS protection system.
The 26M rps DDoS attack originated from a small but powerful botnet of 5,067 devices. On average, each node generated approximately 5,200 rps at peak. To contrast the size of this botnet, we’ve been tracking another much larger but less powerful botnet of over 730,000 devices. The latter, larger botnet wasn’t able to generate more than one Continue reading
Video: Rogue IPv6 RA Challenges
IPv6 security-focused presentations were usually an awesome opportunity to lean back and enjoy another round of whack-a-mole, often starting with an attacker using IPv6 Router Advertisements to divert traffic (see also: getting bored at Brussels airport) .
Rogue IPv6 RA challenges and the corresponding countermeasures are thus a mandatory part of any IPv6 security training, and Christopher Werny did a great job describing them in IPv6 security webinar.
You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video.
Private Access Tokens: eliminating CAPTCHAs on iPhones and Macs with open standards
This post is also available in 日本語, Español.
Today we’re announcing Private Access Tokens, a completely invisible, private way to validate that real users are visiting your site. Visitors using operating systems that support these tokens, including the upcoming versions of macOS or iOS, can now prove they’re human without completing a CAPTCHA or giving up personal data. This will eliminate nearly 100% of CAPTCHAs served to these users.
What does this mean for you?
If you’re an Internet user:
- We’re making your mobile web experience more pleasant and more private than other networks at the same time.
- You won’t see a CAPTCHA on a supported iOS or Mac device (other devices coming soon!) accessing the Cloudflare network.
If you’re a web or application developer:
- Know your user is coming from an authentic device and signed application, verified by the device vendor directly.
- Validate users without maintaining a cumbersome SDK.
If you’re a Cloudflare customer:
- You don’t have to do anything! Cloudflare will automatically ask for and utilize Private Access Tokens
- Your visitors won’t see a CAPTCHA, and we’ll ask for less data from their devices.
Introducing Private Access Tokens
Over the past year, Cloudflare has collaborated Continue reading
HTTP RFCs have evolved: A Cloudflare view of HTTP usage trends
Today, a cluster of Internet standards were published that rationalize and modernize the definition of HTTP - the application protocol that underpins the web. This work includes updates to, and refactoring of, HTTP semantics, HTTP caching, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and the brand-new HTTP/3. Developing these specifications has been no mean feat and today marks the culmination of efforts far and wide, in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and beyond. We thought it would be interesting to celebrate the occasion by sharing some analysis of Cloudflare's view of HTTP traffic over the last 12 months.
However, before we get into the traffic data, for quick reference, here are the new RFCs that you should make a note of and start using:
- HTTP Semantics - RFC 9110
- HTTP's overall architecture, common terminology and shared protocol aspects such as request and response messages, methods, status codes, header and trailer fields, message content, representation data, content codings and much more. Obsoletes RFCs 2818, 7231, 7232, 7233, 7235, 7538, 7615, 7694, and portions of 7230.
- HTTP Caching - RFC 9111
- HTTP caches and related header fields to control the behavior of response caching. Obsoletes RFC 7234.
- Continue reading
Cisco CyberOps Associate
Information Security was one of the fields that Cisco systems used to, and still heavily participating.
Now a days not just information security, but cyber security as well, is a field that Cisco is going in and training many
of their engineers to profession.
Information Security vs. Cyber Security
The main difference summarizes the concept of both the domains, that is for information security, it is mainly
About securing the network components and assets from unauthorized access starting from physical access
Towards the control access, and by that it means accessing the nodes controlling the network, and affecting it.
Cyber security on the other hand is about protecting the same components from attacks, inside and outside attacks.
The attacks aim is usually either stealing sensitive data, or sabotage network components, or sometimes “both”.
Cisco’s role in the fields
Information Security wise, or IT Security wise, Cisco have been there for years, and they’ve been famous for their IT Security programs including the old obsolete CCNA Security, and the CCNP/CCIE Security programs that are still valid and refreshing till now a day.
Cyber Security wise, Cisco have evolved and developed their programs to present the CyberOps programs that includes the: