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Category Archives for "Security"

DockerCon 2016 Vendor Meetings

While at DockerCon 2016 in Seattle today, I took some time on the expo floor to talk to a number of different vendors, mostly focused on networking solutions. Here are some notes from these discussions. I may follow up with additional posts on some of these technologies; it will largely depend on time and the ease by which the technologies/products may be consumed.

Plumgrid

My first stop was the Plumgrid booth. I’d heard of Plumgrid, but wanted to take this time to better understand their architecture. As it turns out, their architecture is quite interesting. Plumgrid is one of the primary commercial sponsors behind the IO Visor project, a Linux Foundation project, which leverages the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) subsystem in the Linux kernel. Using eBPF, Plumgrid has created in-kernel virtual network functions (VNFs) that do things like bridging, routing, network address translation (NAT), and firewalling. Combined with a scale-out central control plane and leveraging the Linux kernel’s built-in support for VXLAN, this enables Plumgrid to create overlay networks and apply very granular security policies to attached workloads (which could be VMs or containers).

Project Calico

Next, I stopped by the Calico booth. Unlike many of the networking Continue reading

Tesla review: What you need to know about charging

Before you buy an electric car, you need to understand charging. It’s a huge deal. You think it works almost like filling the gas tank. It doesn’t. Before going on long trips, you first need to do math and a bit of planning.


The Math

Like BMW model numbers indicate engine size, Tesla model numbers indicate the size of the battery, so my "Tesla S P90D" has a 90kwh (killowatt-hour) battery, with a 286mile range. Their lowest end model is the “Tesla S 60”, which has a 60kwh hour battery, or a 208mile advertised range.

In the United States, a typical plug is a 120volt circuit with a maximum of 15amps. Doing the math, this is how long it’ll take for me to recharge the battery:


That’s right, 1.4 days (or 2.1 days for a 90kwh car). This is the absolute worse case scenario, mind you, but it demonstrates that you have to pay attention to charging. You can't simply drive up to a station, fill up the tank in a couple minutes, and drive away.

Let’s say you live in Austin, Texas, and you have a meeting in Dallas. You think that you can drive up to Continue reading

Ethereum/TheDAO hack simplified

The news in the Bitcoin world is the Ethereum/DAO hack. I thought I'd write up a simplified explanation.

What is Bitcoin?

I'm sure you know, or have an idea what Bitcoin is, but I'll explain it again in terms that are important here.

Bitcoin is just a public ledger (the "blockchain"), of all transaction there ever was. This ledger is huge (80-gigabytes) and growing, but Moore's Law says computers grow even faster, so that shouldn't be a problem.

Each entry in the ledger says to move the coins received in these previous entries, and give them to this recipient. In other words:
move these coins I received there, to this guy here
In the future when that guy spends the coin in a new transaction, he'll refer back to this transaction here. That's why it's called a "chain" -- every transaction refers to a previous one, back to the original creation of the coins.

Actually, these transactions aren't fixed as simply moving money around. Instead, a script is used, written in  a bitcoin-specific programming language that can do things like add, multiply, and compare numbers. However, it's not a full programming language. It can't call functions or execute loops. It's Continue reading

Big Chain Deep Dive on Software Gone Wild

A while ago Big Switch Networks engineers realized there’s a cool use case for their tap aggregation application (Big Tap Monitoring Fabric) – an intelligent patch panel traffic steering solution used as security tool chaining infrastructure in DMZ… and thus the Big Chain was born.

Curious how their solution works? Listen to Episode 58 of Software Gone Wild with Andy Shaw and Sandip Shah.

Listen to the podcast

DNS Cookies and DDoS Attacks

DDoS attacks, particularly for ransom—essentially, “give me some bitcoin, or we’ll attack your server(s) and bring you down,” seem to be on the rise. While ransom attacks rarely actually materialize, the threat of DDoS overall is very large, and very large scale. Financial institutions, content providers, and others regularly consume tens of gigabits of attack traffic in the normal course of operation. What can be done about stopping, or at least slowing down, these attacks?

To answer, this question, we need to start with some better idea of some of the common mechanisms used to build a DDoS attack. It’s often not effective to simply take over a bunch of computers and send traffic from them at full speed; the users, and the user’s providers, will often notice machine sending large amounts of traffic in this way. Instead, what the attacker needs is some sort of public server that can (and will) act as an amplifier. Sending this intermediate server should cause the server to send an order of a magnitude more traffic towards the attack target. Ideally, the server, or set of servers, will have almost unlimited bandwidth, and bandwidth utilization characteristics that will make the attack appear Continue reading

Scanning for ClamAV 0day

Last week an 0day was released for ClamAV. Well, not really an 0day so much as somebody noticed idiotic features in ClamAV. So I scanned the Internet for the problem.

The feature is that the daemon listens for commands that tell it to do things like scan files. Normally, it listens only locally for such commands, but can be reconfigured to listen remotely on TCP port 3310. Some packages that include ClamAV sometimes default to this.

It's a simple protocol that consists of sending a command in clear text, like "PING", "VERSION", "SHUTDOWN", or "SCAN
So I ran masscan with the following command:

masscan 0.0.0.0/0 -p3310 --banners --hello-string[3310] VkVSU0lPTg==
Normally when you scan and address range (/0) and port (3310), you'd just see which ports are open/closed. That's not useful in this case, because it finds 2.7 million machines. Instead, you want to establish a full TCP connection. That's what the --banners option does, giving us only 38 thousand machines that successfully establish a connection. The remaining machines are large ranges on the Internet where firewalls are configured to respond with SYN-ACK, with the express purpose of frustrating port scanners.

But of those 38k machines, most are actually Continue reading

Establishing a confidential Service Boundary with Avaya’s SDN Fx

Cover

 

Security is a global requirement. It is also global in the fashion in which it needs to be addressed. But the truth is, regardless of the vertical, the basic components of a security infrastructure do not change. There are firewalls, intrusion detection systems, encryption, networking policies and session border controllers for real time communications. These components also plug together in rather standard fashions or service chains that look largely the same regardless of the vertical or vendor in question. Yes, there are some differences but by and large these modifications are minor.

So the questions begs, why is security so difficult? As it turns out, it is not really the complexities of the technology components themselves, although they certainly have that. It turns out that the real challenge is deciding exactly what to protect and here each vertical will be drastically different. Fortunately, the methods for identifying confidential data or critical control systems are also rather consistent even though the data and applications being protected may vary greatly.

In order for micro-segmentation as a security strategy to succeed, you have to know where the data you need to protect resides. You also need to know how it flows through Continue reading

No, Musky, Feudalism is best for Mars

Recently, the press fawned all over Elon Musk's comments at a conference. Among them was Musk's claim that "direct democracy" would be the best system, where citizen's vote directly for laws, rather than voting for (corrupt) representatives/congressmen. This is nonsense. The best political system would be feudalism.

There is no such thing as "direct democracy". Our representatives in congress are only the first layer on top of a bureaucracy. Most rules that restrict us are not "laws" voted by congress but "regulations" decided by some bureaucrat.

Consider the BP Gulf Oil spill, as an example. It happened because oil companies got cozy with their regulators, the minerals Management Service (MMS), part of the Department of the Interior. The bureaucrats had a dual mandate: to protect the environment, and to promote economic activity. Oil companies lobbied them to risk the environment in favor of profits.

Consider  Obamcare's controversial mandate that health insurers must pay for abortions. This was not part of the law pass by congress, but a decision by the bureaucrats in charge of all the little details in carrying out the law.

Consider the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) regulation of the Internet. It bases its Continue reading

Instrumenting masscan for AFL fuzzing

This blog post is about work in progress. You probably don't want to read it.




So I saw this tweet today:




As it turns it, he's just fuzzing input files. This is good, he's apparently already found some bugs, but it's not a huge threat.

Instead, what really needs to be fuzzed is network input. This is chronic problem with AFL, which is designed for inserting files, not network traffic, into programs.

But making this work is actually pretty trivial. I just need to make a tiny change to masscan so that instead of opening a libpcap adapter, it instead opens a libpcap formatted file.

This change was trivial, successfully running it is tough. You have to configure the command-line so all IP addresses match up with the libpcap file content, which is a pain. I created a sample lipcap file and checked it into the project, along with a help document explaining it. Just git clone the project, run make, then run this command line to see it Continue reading

Micro-segmentation Defined – NSX Securing “Anywhere”

The landscape of the modern data center is rapidly evolving. The migration from physical to virtualized workloads, move towards software-defined data centers, advent of a multi-cloud landscape, proliferation of mobile devices accessing the corporate data center, and adoption of new architectural and deployment models such as microservices and containers has assured the only constant in modern data center evolution is the quest for higher levels of agility and service efficiency. This march forward is not without peril as security often ends up being an afterthought. The operational dexterity achieved through the ability to rapidly deploy new applications overtakes the ability of traditional networking and security controls to maintain an acceptable security posture for those application workloads. That is in addition to a fundamental problem of traditionally structured security not working adequately in more conventional and static data centers.

Without a flexible approach to risk management, which adapts to the onset of new technology paradigms, security silos using disparate approaches are created. These silos act as control islands, making it difficult to apply risk-focused predictability into your corporate security posture, causing unforeseen risks to be realized. These actualized risks cause an organization’s attack surface to grow as the adoption of new compute Continue reading

Technology Short Take #67

Welcome to Technology Short Take #67. Here’s hoping something I’ve collected for you here proves useful!

Networking

  • Anthony Burke has written a script that uses VMware NSX to protect VMware Log Insight instances. More information on the script is in his blog post.
  • Russ White tackles the issue of networking engineers needing to learn to code. Is it necessary? Russ thinks so—but probably not for the reasons you might think. I tend to agree with Russ’ line of thinking.
  • This article from Marcos Hernandez shows one way to do dynamic routing in OpenStack. It’s a bit of a hack, to be honest, but it gets the job done until dynamic routing makes its way into OpenStack Neutron (which looks like it may have landed in the Mitaka release—can anyone confirm?).
  • Jason Messer has an article describing how networking works with Windows containers.
  • Tom Hollingsworth discusses how the rise of overlay networks killed large layer 2 networks and tools for building large layer 2 networks, like TRILL.
  • Dmitri Kalintsev examines some options for addressing storage-related connectivity in NSX environments.

Servers/Hardware

My fellow Republicans: don’t support Trump

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, has a post claiming a Trump presidency wouldn't be as bad as people fear. It's a good post. But it's wrong.

Trump is certainly not as bad as his haters claim. Trump not only disables the critical-thinking ability of his supporters, but also of his enemies. In most conversations, I end up defending Trump -- not because I support him as a candidate, but because I support critical-thinking. He's only racist sometimes, most of the time I love his political incorrectness.

But with all that said, he would indeed be a horrible president. As a long-term Republican, I'd prefer a Hillary Clinton presidency, and I hate Hillary to the depths of my soul. She's corrupt, and worst of all, she's a leftist.

But there's a thing worse than being a leftist (or right-winger) and that's being a "populist demagogue". Populist demagogues tell you that all your problems are caused by them (you know, those people), and present unrealistic solutions to problems. They appeal to base emotion and ignorance.

When nations fail because of politics, it's almost always due to populist demagogues. Virtually all dictators are a "man of the people", protecting Continue reading
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