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Technology Short Take #73

Welcome to Technology Short Take #73. Sorry for the long delay since the last Technology Short Take; personal matters have been taking quite the toll (if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know to what personal matters I’m referring). In any case, enough of that—here’s some data center-related content that I hope you find useful!

Networking

  • Ansible has made some good progress in supporting network automation in the latest release (2.2), according to this blog post. This is an area where I hope to spend more time in the coming weeks before years’ end.
  • Tomas Fojta shows how to use a PowerShell script to monitor the health of NSX Edge gateways.
  • Jeremy Stretch mulls over the (perceived) problem of getting traffic into and out of overlay networks. I recommend reading this article, as well as reading the comments. Many commenters suggest just using L3 and having the hosts participate in a routing protocol like BGP, but as Jeremy points out many switches don’t have the capacity to handle that many routes. (Or, if they do, they’re quite expensive.) Seems like there’s this company in Palo Alto making a product that handles this issue pretty decently…(hint).
  • Cumulus Continue reading

Reactive Malicious Domain Detection (ENTRADA)

One interesting trend of the last year or two is the rising use of data analytics and ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) in solving network engineering problems. Several ideas (and/or solutions) were presented this year at the IETF meeting in Seoul; this post takes a look at one of these. To lay the groundwork, botnets are often controlled through a set of domain names registered just for this purpose. In the same way, domain names are often registered just to provide a base for sending bulk mail (SPAM), phishing attacks, etc. It might be nice for registrars to make some attempt to remove such domains abused for malicious activities, but it’s difficult to know what “normal” activity might look like, or for the registrar to even track the usage of a particular domain to detect malicious activity. One of the papers presented in the Software Defined Network Research Group (SDNRG) addresses this problem directly.

The first problem is actually collecting enough information to analyze in a useful way. DNS servers, even top level domain (TLD) servers collect a huge amount of data—much more than most engineers might suspect. In fact, the DNS system is one of those vast sources of information Continue reading

Introducing Image Signing Policy in Docker Datacenter

My colleague colleague Ying Li and I recently blogged about Securing the Software Supply Chain and drew the analogy between traditional physical supply chains and the creation, building, and deployment involved in a software supply chain. We believe that a software pipeline that can be verified at every stage is an important step in raising the security bar for all software, and we didn’t stop at simply presenting the idea.

Software Supply Chain

Integrated Content Trust and Image Signing Policy

In the recent release of Docker Datacenter,  we announced a new feature that starts to brings these security capabilities together along the software supply chain. Built on Notary, a signing infrastructure based on The Update Framework (TUF), along with Docker Content Trust (DCT), an integration of the Notary toolchain into the Docker client, DDC now allows administrators to set up signing policies that prevent untrusted content from being deployed.

In this release of DDC, the Docker Trusted Registry (DTR) now also ships with integrated Notary services. This means you’re ready to start using DCT and the new Signing Policy features out of the box! No separate server and database to install, configure and connect to the registry.

DTR replicas

Bringing it all together

Image Continue reading

Comments for my biracial niece

I spent the night after Trump’s victory consoling my biracial niece worried about the election. Here are my comments. You won’t like them, expecting the opposite given the title. But it’s what I said.

I preferred Hillary, but that doesn’t mean Trump is an evil choice.

Don’t give into the hate. You get most of your news via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which are at best one-sided and unfair. At worst, they are completely inaccurate. Social media posts are driven by emotion, not logic. Sometimes that emotion is love of cute puppies. Mostly it’s anger, fear, and hate. Instead of blindly accepting what you read, challenge it. Find the original source. Find a better explanation. Search for context.

Don’t give into the hate. The political issues that you are most concerned about are not simple and one-sided with obvious answers. They are complex and nuanced. Just because somebody disagrees with you doesn’t mean they are unreasonable or evil. In today’s politics, it has become the norm that we can’t simply disagree with somebody, but must also vilify and hate them. We’ve redefined politics to be the fight between the virtuous (whatever side we are on) and the Continue reading

How to teach endian

On /r/programming is this post about byte-order/endianness. It gives the same information as most documents on the topic. It is wrong. It's been wrong for over 30 years. Here's how it should be taught.

One of the major disciplines in computer science is parsing/formatting. This is the process of converting the external format of data (file formats, network protocols, hardware registers) into the internal format (the data structures that software operates on).

It should be a formal computer-science discipline, because it's actually a lot more difficult than you'd expect. That's because the majority of vulnerabilities in software that hackers exploit are due to parsing bugs. Since programmers don't learn about parsing formally, they figure it out for themselves, creating ad hoc solutions that are prone to bugs. For example, programmers assume external buffers cannot be larger than internal ones, leading to buffer overflows.

An external format must be well-defined. What the first byte means must be written down somewhere, then what the second byte means, and so on. For Internet protocols, these formats are written in RFCs, such as RFC 791 for the "Internet Protocol". For file formats, these are written in documents, such as those describing GIF files, JPEG Continue reading

Docker Datacenter adds enterprise orchestration, security policy and refreshed UI

Today we are excited to introduce new additions to Docker Datacenter, our Container as a Service (CaaS) platform for enterprise IT and application teams. Docker Datacenter provides an integrated platform for developers and IT operations teams to collaborate securely on the application lifecycle. Built on the foundation of Docker Engine, Docker Datacenter (DDC) also provides integrated orchestration, management and security around managing resources like access, images, applications, networks and more across the cluster.

This latest release of Docker Datacenter includes a number of new features and improvements focused in the following areas:

  • Enterprise orchestration and operations to make running and operating multi container applications simple, secure and scalable
  • Integrated end to end security to cover all of the components and people that interact with the application pipeline
  • User experience and performance improvements ensure that even the most complex operations are handled efficiently

Let’s dig into some of the new features.

Enterprise orchestration with backward compatibility

This release of Docker Datacenter not only integrates the built in orchestration capabilities of Docker Engine 1.12 utilizing swarm mode and services, but also provides backwards compatibility for standalone containers using the docker run commands. To help enterprise application teams migrate, it is important Continue reading

Introduction to Quantum Cryptography

How Does Internet Work - We know what is networking

Quantum cryptography is a new technique of securing computer network communication channel. Existing standard crypto systems are using advanced algorithms to create key pairs which are extremely hard to inverse engineer. Quantum cryptography avoids any mathematical algorithm and uses principles of quantum physics. Quantum crypto implements a new technique of generating and exchanging crypto keys which makes it impossible for third party entities to get those keys by snooping or to create man in the middle by snooping and sending copies of original key. Keys generated in this way will automatically destroy themselves if read by third-party interferer. When generated between two sides, using quantum key distribution, secret keys will

Introduction to Quantum Cryptography

Yes, the FBI can review 650,000 emails in 8 days

In today's news, Comey announces the FBI have reviewed all 650,000 emails found on Anthony Wiener's computer and determined there's nothing new. Some have questioned whether this could be done in 8 days. Of course it could be -- those were 650,000 emails to Wiener, not Hillary.




Reading Wiener's own emails, those unrelated to his wife Huma or Hillary, is unlikely to be productive. Therefore, the FBI is going to filter those 650,000 Wiener emails to get at those emails that were also sent to/from Hillary and Huma.

That's easy for automated tools to do. Just search the From: and To: fields for email addresses known to be used by Hillary and associates. For example, search for [email protected] (Hillary's current email address) and [email protected] (Huma Abedin's current email).

Below is an example email header from the Podesta dump:

From: Jennifer Palmieri <[email protected]>
Date: Sat, 2 May 2015 11:23:56 -0400
Message-ID: <-8018289478115811964@unknownmsgid>
Subject: WJC NBC interview
To: H <[email protected]>, John Podesta <[email protected]>, 
 Huma  Continue reading
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