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The Best and the Brightest Security and Privacy Experts Are Gathering Virtually at NDSS 2021

The 28th consecutive Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2021) kicks off today. NDSS is a premier academic research conference addressing a wide range of topics on network and system security. It’s an incubator for new, innovative ideas and research on the security and privacy of the Internet.

NDSS 2021, which takes place 21-25 February, will be one of the biggest NDSS symposia yet, featuring two keynotes, 90 peer-reviewed academic papers, six co-located workshops, and 19 posters focusing on vital and timely topics. All of this will happen virtually for the first time!

Here are some of the highlights.

Workshops

This year’s program officially started yesterday with three workshops on Sunday, 21 February. NDSS workshops are organized around a single topic and provide an opportunity for greater dialogue between researchers and practitioners in the area.

The Binary Analysis Research (BAR) Workshop returns for its fourth year at NDSS. Binary analysis refers to the process where humans and automated systems examine underlying code in software to discover, exploit, and defend against vulnerabilities. With the enormous and ever-increasing amount of software in the world today, formalized and automated methods of analysis are vital to improving security. This workshop will emphasize the Continue reading

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Behind the Scenes of the SunBurst Attack

Check Point sponsored this post. Lior Sonntag Lior is a Security Researcher at Check Point Software Technologies. He is a security enthusiast who loves to break stuff and put it back together. He's passionate about various InfoSec topics such as Cloud Security, Offensive Security, Vulnerability Research and Reverse Engineering. The biggest cyberattack in recent times came in the form of what seems like a

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Using HPKE to Encrypt Request Payloads

The Managed Rules team was recently given the task of allowing Enterprise users to debug Firewall Rules by viewing the part of a request that matched the rule. This makes it easier to determine what specific attacks a rule is stopping or why a request was a false positive, and what possible refinements of a rule could improve it.

The fundamental problem, though, was how to securely store this debugging data as it may contain sensitive data such as personally identifiable information from submissions, cookies, and other parts of the request. We needed to store this data in such a way that only the user who is allowed to access it can do so. Even Cloudflare shouldn't be able to see the data, following our philosophy that any personally identifiable information that passes through our network is a toxic asset.

This means we needed to encrypt the data in such a way that we can allow the user to decrypt it, but not Cloudflare. This means public key encryption.

Now we needed to decide on which encryption algorithm to use. We came up with some questions to help us evaluate which one to use:

• What requirements do we have for Continue reading

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Why You Should Choose NGAC as Your Access Control Model

Tetrate sponsored this post. Jimmy Song Jimmy is a developer advocate at Tetrate, CNCF Ambassador, co-founder of ServiceMesher, and Cloud Native Community (China). He mainly focuses on Kubernetes, Istio, and cloud native architectures. Different companies or software providers have devised countless ways to control user access to functions or resources, such as Discretionary Access Control (DAC), Mandatory Access Control (MAC), Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC). In essence, whatever the type of access control model, three basic elements can be abstracted: user, system/application, and policy. In this article, we will introduce ABAC, RBAC, and a new access control model — Next Generation Access Control (NGAC) — and compare the similarities and differences between the three, as well as why you should consider NGAC. What Is RBAC? Ignasi Barrera Ignasi is a founding engineer at Tetrate and is a member of the Apache Software Foundation. RBAC, or Role-Based Access Control, takes an approach whereby users are granted (or denied) access to resources based on their role in the organization. Every role is assigned a collection of permissions and restrictions, which is great because you don’t need to keep track of every system user and their attributes. You just Continue reading

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SEC 3. Building your own containerised PKI (root CA) with Linux and Docker to simplify and secure network automation

Hello my friend,

You know our passion to network automation. We truly believe, that this is the only sustainable way for the network development and operation. In the same time, one the key goals of the automation is to make your network secure and safe. Therefore, the security of the automation and communication channels used by automation is very important. So today we’ll take a look how to build

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No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

Can automation make your network better?

Automation is the key component of the perpetual engine of your network development and operation. It allows you to run the network quick, stable, and safe. And we are willing you to benefit as much as you can from that.

We have created a new training, which is focused only on the Nornir and you can use it for the network (and not only) automation. It is an organic extension of our network automation training, which assumes you are already Continue reading

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Industry-First Pay-as-you-go SaaS Platform for Kubernetes Security and Observability

We are excited to introduce Calico Cloud, a pay-as-you-go SaaS platform for Kubernetes security and observability. With Calico Cloud, users only pay for services consumed and are billed monthly, getting immediate value without upfront investment.

Introduction

Calico Cloud gives DevOps, DevSecOps, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams a single pane of glass across multi-cluster and multi-cloud Kubernetes environments to deploy a standard set of egress access controls, enforce security policies, ensure compliance, get end-to-end visibility, and troubleshoot applications. Calico Cloud is Kubernetes-native and provides native extensions to enable security and observability as code for easy and consistent enforcement across Kubernetes distributions, multi-cloud and hybrid environments. It scales automatically with the managed clusters according to the user requirements to ensure uninterrupted real-time visibility at any scale.

Security and Observability Challenges

• North-South Controls: Often microservices need to communicate with services or API endpoints running outside the Kubernetes cluster. Implementing access control from Kubernetes pods to external endpoints is hard. Most traditional or cloud provider’s firewalls do not understand the Kubernetes context which forces the ops team to allow traffic from the entire cluster or a set of worker nodes.
• East-West Controls: Even after effective perimeter-based north-south controls, the organizations face challenges to Continue reading

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Worth Reading: Internet of Trash

I love the recent Internet of Trash article by Geoff Huston, in particular this bit:

“Move fast and break things” is not a tenable paradigm for this industry today, if it ever was. In the light of our experience with the outcomes of an industry that became fixated on pumping out minimally viable product, it’s a paradigm that heads towards what we would conventionally label as criminal negligence.

Of course it’s not just the Internet-of-Trash. Whole IT is filled with examples of startups and “venerable” companies doing the same thing and boasting about their disruptiveness. Now go and read the whole article ;)

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Worth Reading: Internet of Trash

I love the recent Internet of Trash article by Geoff Huston, in particular this bit:

“Move fast and break things” is not a tenable paradigm for this industry today, if it ever was. In the light of our experience with the outcomes of an industry that became fixated on pumping out minimally viable product, it’s a paradigm that heads towards what we would conventionally label as criminal negligence.

Of course it’s not just the Internet-of-Trash. Whole IT is filled with examples of startups and “venerable” companies doing the same thing and boasting about their disruptiveness. Now go and read the whole article ;)

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Best Practices for Securely Setting up a Kubernetes Cluster

David Bisson David Bisson is an information security writer and security junkie. He's a contributing editor to IBM's Security Intelligence, Tripwire's The State of Security Blog, and a contributing writer to Bora. He also regularly produces written content for Zix and a number of other companies in the digital security space. Organizations are increasingly looking to containers to fuel their digital transformations. In 2020, documentation: Load balancing. Organizations turn to Kubernetes to make Continue reading

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Tetrate: A Service Mesh Can Be the Security Kernel for Distributed Systems

If you are going to use a service mesh to manage a set of microservices, you might as well start thinking of the service mesh as the “security kernel” for these distributed systems, suggested Tetrate Senior Engineer U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Tetrate, a purveyor of an

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Meraki-CLI – Command Line Utility for the Meraki Dashboard

Meraki changed the industry years ago as one of the first platforms to use a cloud portal for all configuration; forgoing the typical local CLI/GUI administration of network appliances. One of the first things a traditional network engineer (like myself) may notice about Meraki equipment is their complete lack of a command-line interface. For the […]

The post Meraki-CLI – Command Line Utility for the Meraki Dashboard appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Why Open Source Project Maintainers are Reluctant to use Digital Signatures, Two-Factor Authentication

We all agree that open source development methods help create better code. The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” which explained how the methodology of openness worked in Fetchmail project. But, that’s a general rule. Open source can still be abused by unscrupulous developers. So, why don’t we make sure when a programmer attempts to merge code into a program that they’re really who they say they are, by using two-factor authentication (2FA) or a digital signature? Good question. You might not think this is a real problem. Alas, it is. For example, in 2019 CursedGrabber malware was successfully Linux Foundation’s 2020 FOSS Contributor Survey, when developers were asked if the open source projects Continue reading

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Kubernetes Observability Challenges: The Need for an AI-Driven Solution

Kubernetes provides abstraction and simplicity with a declarative model to program complex deployments. However, this abstraction and simplicity create complexity when debugging microservices in this abstract layer. The following four vectors make it challenging to troubleshoot microservices.

1. The first vector is the Kubernetes microservices architecture, where tens to hundreds of microservices communicate. Debugging such a componentized application is challenging and requires specialized tools.
2. The second vector is the distributed infrastructure spread across heterogeneous on-premises and cloud environments.
3. The third vector of complexity is the dynamic nature of Kubernetes infrastructure. The platform spins up required resources and provides an ephemeral infrastructure environment to scale the application based on demand.
4. Lastly, in such a distributed environment, Kubernetes deployments need fine-grained security and an observability model with defense-in-depth to keep them secure. While modern security controls effectively protect your workloads, they can have unintended consequences by preventing applications from running smoothly and creating an additional layer of complexity when debugging applications.

Today, DevOps and SRE teams must stitch together an enormous amount of data from multiple, disparate systems that monitor infrastructure and services layers in order to troubleshoot Kubernetes microservices issues. Not only is it overwhelming to stitch this data, but troubleshooting using Continue reading

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Fence Rail Transposition and Caesar Ciphers in Python

Recently I wrote simple encryption and decryption programs in Python to practice my coding skills. The first cipher_encrypt utility takes the clear_text.txt file as input. It first capitalizes all letters and then encrypts the text with the Rail fence cipher. The number of rows can be set using the variable k. The result of the […]
Continue reading...

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Worth Reading: AAA Deep Dive on Cisco Devices

Decades ago I understood the intricacies of AAA on Cisco IOS. These days I wing it and keep throwing spaghetti at the virtual wall until something sticks and I can log in (after all, it’s all in a lab, and I’m interested in routing protocols not interactions with TACACS+ server).

If you’re experiencing similar challenges you might appreciate AAA Deep Dive on Cisco Devices by the one and only Daniel Dib.

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Worth Reading: AAA Deep Dive on Cisco Devices

Decades ago I understood the intricacies of AAA on Cisco IOS. These days I wing it and keep throwing spaghetti at the virtual wall until something sticks and I can log in (after all, it’s all in a lab, and I’m interested in routing protocols not interactions with TACACS+ server).

If you’re experiencing similar challenges you might appreciate AAA Deep Dive on Cisco Devices by the one and only Daniel Dib.

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Modernize Network Security With Palo Alto Networks Prisma Access

Prisma Access, from Palo Alto Networks, combines security and access capabilities including CASB, FWaaS, and Zero Trust into a single, cloud-delivered service. Prisma Access can help enterprises provide a secure, high-performance experience for their remote workforces.

The post Modernize Network Security With Palo Alto Networks Prisma Access appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Offloading Authentication and Authorization from Application Code to a Service Mesh

Tetrate sponsored this post. Zack Butcher Zack is a Tetrate engineer. He is an Istio contributor and member of the Istio Steering Committee and co-author of 'Istio: Up and Running (O’Reilly: 2019).' In an upcoming Ramaswamy Chandramouli, we’ll be presenting recommendations around safely and securely offloading authentication and authorization from application code to a service mesh. We’ll be discussing the advantages and disadvantages of that approach. This article presents an overview of the paper that will be presented later this month, at

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Hedge #66: Tyler McDaniel and BGP Peer Locking

Tyler McDaniel joins Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ to discuss a study on BGP peerlocking, which is designed to prevent route leaks in the global Internet. From the study abstract:

BGP route leaks frequently precipitate serious disruptions to interdomain routing. These incidents have plagued the Internet for decades while deployment and usability issues cripple efforts to mitigate the problem. Peerlock, introduced in 2016, addresses route leaks with a new approach. Peerlock enables filtering agreements between transit providers to protect their own networks without the need for broad cooperation or a trust infrastructure.

download

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Holistic web protection: industry recognition for a prolific 2020

I love building products that solve real problems for our customers. These days I don’t get to do so as much directly with our Engineering teams. Instead, about half my time is spent with customers listening to and learning from their security challenges, while the other half of my time is spent with other Cloudflare Product Managers (PMs) helping them solve these customer challenges as simply and elegantly as possible. While I miss the deeply technical engineering discussions, I am proud to have the opportunity to look back every year on all that we’ve shipped across our application security teams.

Taking the time to reflect on what we’ve delivered also helps to reinforce my belief in the Cloudflare approach to shipping product: release early, stay close to customers for feedback, and iterate quickly to deliver incremental value. To borrow a term from the investment world, this approach brings the benefits of compounded returns to our customers: we put new products that solve real-world problems into their hands as quickly as possible, and then reinvest the proceeds of our shared learnings immediately back into the product.

It is these sustained investments that allow us to release a flurry of small improvements Continue reading