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VMworld US 2019: Networking and Security Recap

VMworld US 2019 has come to a close. If you didn’t attend, don’t worry as we still have VMworld Europe right around the corner. Join us November 4-7, 2019 to hear experts discuss cloud, networking and security, digital workspace, digital trends and more!  Register for VMworld Europe now.

Below is a quick recap and resources to check out from VMworld US 2019.

Stats from VMworld US 2019

• For networking and security we delivered 91 Breakout Sessions + 2 Showcase Keynotes
  • VMware NSX-T – Getting Started was the second most played video post-VMworld!
• VMware NSX was the #1 attended Hands-On-Lab (HOL), and there was a total of 1,922 labs taken on NSX
  • 17,277 NSX networks were created at HOL
• VMware NSX Intelligence won TechTarget’s Best of Show award – Judge’s Choice for Disruptive Technology

Congratulations to our NSX Intelligence team: Anirban Sengupta, Umesh Mahajan, Farzad Ghannadian, Kausum Kumar, Catherine Fan and Ray Budavari.

Surprise guest Michael Dell stopped by the Solutions Exchange to check out demos of what’s new from the networking and security business unit demoed by Chris McCain.

Technical Networking and Security Sessions from VMworld US 2019

Below is a list of sessions that jump into the NSX Continue reading

Oracle Pushes More Automation Into Cloud Security

Cloudflare IPO Scorches Wall Street

How Cloudflare and Wall Street Are Helping Encrypt the Internet Today

Today has been a big day for Cloudflare, as we became a public company on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: NET). To mark the occasion, we decided to bring our favorite entropy machines to the floor of the NYSE. Footage of these lava lamps is being used as an additional seed to our entropy-generation system LavaRand — bolstering Internet encryption for over 20 million Internet properties worldwide.

(This is mostly for fun. But when’s the last time you saw a lava lamp on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange?)

A little context: generating truly random numbers using computers is impossible, because code is inherently deterministic (i.e. predictable). To compensate for this, engineers draw from pools of randomness created by entropy generators, which is a fancy term for "things that are truly unpredictable".

It turns out that lava lamps are fantastic sources of entropy, as was first shown by Silicon Graphics in the 1990s. It’s a torch we’ve been proud to carry forward: today, Cloudflare uses lava lamps to generate entropy that helps make millions of Internet properties more secure.

Housed in our San Francisco headquarters is a wall filled with dozens of lava lamps, Continue reading

Huawei Offers 5G Technology License Up for Bid to the West

SD-WAN Vendors Gain Ground, Bolster Security

IBM Injects Cloud Innovation Into Its z15 Mainframe

SD-WAN Named Most Disruptive Network Tech of 2019

Citrix Fortifies SD-WAN With Palo Alto Firewalls

How Castle is Building Codeless Customer Account Protection

This is a guest post by Johanna Larsson, of Castle, who designed and built the Castle Cloudflare app and the supporting infrastructure.

Strong security should be easy.

Asking your consumers again and again to take responsibility for their security through robust passwords and other security measures doesn’t work. The responsibility of security needs to shift from end users to the companies who serve them.

Castle is leading the way for companies to better protect their online accounts with millions of consumers being protected every day. Uniquely, Castle extends threat prevention and protection for both pre and post login ensuring you can keep friction low but security high. With realtime responses and automated workflows for account recovery, overwhelmed security teams are given a hand. However, when you’re that busy, sometimes deploying new solutions takes more time than you have. Reducing time to deployment was a priority so Castle turned to Cloudflare Workers.

User security and friction

When security is no longer optional and threats are not black or white, security teams are left with trying to determine how to allow end-user access and transaction completions when there are hints of risk, or when not all of the information is available. Continue reading

Kong’s Kuma Service Mesh Climbs the Kubernetes Wall

Masergy Debuts AIOps, Your Virtual Network Assistant

Is Pentagon JEDI Program a $10B Cloud Security Fiasco?

Google Fortifies Kubernetes Nodes Against Boot Attacks

Money Moves: August 2019

Prevent DNS (and other) spoofing with Calico

AquaSec’s Daniel Sagi recently authored a blog post about DNS spoofing in Kubernetes. TLDR is that if you use default networking in Kubernetes you might be vulnerable to ARP spoofing which can allow pods to spoof (impersonate) the IP addresses of other pods. Since so much traffic is dialed via domain names rather than IPs, spoofing DNS can allow you to redirect lots of traffic inside the cluster for nefarious purposes.

So this is bad, right? Fortunately, Calico already prevents ARP spoofing out of the box. Furthermore, Calico’s design prevents other classes of spoofing attacks. In this post we’ll discuss how Calico keeps you safe from IP address spoofing, and how to go above and beyond for extra security.

ARP Spoofing

ARP spoofing is an attack that allows a malicious pod or network endpoint to receive IP traffic that isn’t meant for it. Sagi’s post already describes this well, so I won’t repeat the details here. An important thing to note, however, is that ARP spoofing only works if the malicious entity and the target share the same layer 2 segment (e.g. have direct Ethernet connectivity). In Calico, the network is fully routed at layer 3, meaning that Continue reading

An MNO’s Guide to Buying a 5G-Ready Next-Generation Firewall

Cloudflare IPO Targets a $483M Haul, $3.5B Valuation

Thread on the OSI model is a lie