Pwned Passwords Padding (ft. Lava Lamps and Workers)

Pwned Passwords Padding (ft. Lava Lamps and Workers)
Pwned Passwords Padding (ft. Lava Lamps and Workers)

The Pwned Passwords API (part of Troy Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned service) is used tens of millions of times each day, to alert users if their credentials are breached in a variety of online services, browser extensions and applications. Using Cloudflare, the API cached around 99% of requests, making it very efficient to run.

From today, we are offering a new security advancement in the Pwned Passwords API - API clients can receive responses padded with random data. This exists to effectively protect from any potential attack vectors which seek to use passive analysis of the size of API responses to identify which anonymised bucket a user is querying. I am hugely grateful to security researcher Matt Weir who I met at PasswordsCon in Stockholm and has explored proof-of-concept analysis of unpadded API responses in Pwned Passwords and has driven some of the work to consider the addition of padded responses.

Now, by passing a header of “Add-Padding” with a value of “true”, Pwned Passwords API users are able to request padded API responses (to a minimum of 800 entries with additional padding of a further 0-200 entries). The padding consists of randomly generated hash suffixes with the usage Continue reading

My Cisco Certified DevNet Professional Journey, Part 1 by Nick Russo

On 27 February 2020, I took and passed the Cisco Certified DevNet Professional Core (DEVCOR) exam on my first attempt. For those who like to memorize dates, yes, I did pass DEVASC and DEVCOR on the same day to cut down on trips to the test center. Like DEVASC, this exam was fair and all blueprint topics were appropriately represented. You can read about my DEVASC blog here (provide link to other blog).

I want to focus on what I did to succeed and less about the exam structure itself. You can learn more about the official certification here. This blog is focused primarily on the DEVCOR exam. Before talking about the exam, just know that you need to pass the core exam plus one concentration exam to earn the Cisco Certified DevNet Professional certification. I also passed the ENAUTO exam, which focuses on enterprise network automation. I’ll write about it in “part 2” later.

Before attempting this certification, you should already have a DevNet Associate certification (not required) or comparable knowledge, plus at least 3 years of software development/automation experience. The DEVCOR exam was no joke. It was harder than the CCIE RS and SP written exams, and about Continue reading

Machine Learning in Networking Products

AI is the new SDN, and we’re constantly bombarded with networking vendor announcements promising AI-induced nirvana, from reinventing Clippy to automatic anomaly- and threat identifications.

If you still think these claims are realistic, it’s time you start reading what people involved in AI/ML have to say about hype in their field. I posted a few links in the past, and the Packet Pushers Human Infrastructure magazine delivered another goodie into my Inbox.

You REALLY SHOULD read the original article, here’s the TL&DR summary for differently-attentive:

Machine Learning in Networking Products

AI is the new SDN, and we’re constantly bombarded with networking vendor announcements promising AI-induced nirvana, from reinventing Clippy to automatic anomaly- and threat identifications.

If you still think these claims are realistic, it’s time you start reading what people involved in AI/ML have to say about hype in their field. I posted a few links in the past, and the Packet Pushers Human Infrastructure magazine delivered another goodie into my Inbox.

You REALLY SHOULD read the original article, here’s the TL&DR summary for differently-attentive:

Read more ...

Millions of tiny databases

Millions of tiny databases, Brooker et al., NSDI’20

This paper is a real joy to read. It takes you through the thinking processes and engineering practices behind the design of a key part of the control plane for AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS): the Physalia database that stores configuration information.

In the same spirit as Paxos Made Live, this paper describes the details, choices and tradeoffs that are required to put a consensus system into production.

The core algorithms (chain-replication, Paxos-based consensus) aren’t the stars of the show here, instead the paper focuses on how these algorithms are deployed, and the software engineering practices behind the creation of a mission-critical production system employing them.

A guiding principle

Engineering decisions involve making lots of trade-offs. If you want to emerge with a coherent design, then it’s well worth spending some time thinking about the principle(s) by which you’re going to make them. For Physalia, and for AWS more generally, the guiding principle is minimise the blast radius.

Over the decade since [the introduction of Availability Zones], our thinking on failure and availability has continued to evolve, and we paid increasing attention to blast radius and correlation of failure. Continue reading

Seawater, humidity inspire new ways to generate power

The possiblity of a future power-availability crunch – spurred in part by a global increase in data usage – is driving researchers to get creative with a slew of new and modified ways to generate and store energy.Ongoing projects include the use of seawater for batteries; grabbing ambient humidity; massive water storage systems for hydropower; and solar panels that work at night. Here are some details:Batteries based on seawater Seawater will provide "super-batteries," says the University of Southern Denmark. Researchers there have been studying how to use sodium, which is abundant in seawater, as an alternative to lithium in batteries.To read this article in full, please click here

Starting a WISP: guide to selecting a routing architecture

Understanding the choices – why is routing design so important?

Routing is the foundation of every IP network. Even a router as small as the one in your home has a routing table and makes routing decisions.

Selecting a routing architecture is a critical but often overlooked step to ensure that a startup WISP can provide the necessary performance, scalability and resiliency to its subscribers.

This post will go through each the major design types and highlight pros/cons and when it is appropriate to use a particular routing architecture.

A note on IPv6

Dual stack is assumed in all of the designs presented. The cost of IPv4 public will continue to climb.

It’s no longer a scalable option in 2020 to build an ISP network without at least a plan for IPv6 and ideally a production implementation.

1. Flat network (aka bridged network)

“Behind the L3 boundary, there be L2 dragons”

-ancient network proverb

Unfortunately, this is often the worst choice for all but the smallest WISPs that don’t have any plans to scale beyond 1 to 100 subscribers.

Bridged networks with one or more subnets in the same L2 broadcast domain are the most commonly deployed routing design that Continue reading

Extend Fortinet FortiGate to Kubernetes with Calico Enterprise 2.7

We are excited to announce the general availability of Calico Enterprise 2.7. With this release, Fortinet’s 400,000 customers can use FortiGate to enforce network security policies into and out of the Kubernetes cluster as well as traffic between pods within the cluster.

  • Kubernetes workloads populate the Fortigate GUI
  • The network team can then create and enforce policies in Fortigate and have them enforced as Calico Policy
  • Saves time and money and lets the network team retain the firewall responsibility (which also frees up time for ITOps)

We have also added many new exciting capabilities that help platform engineers blow through barriers blocking their path to production, and advanced cybersecurity capabilities for those already running production workloads.

  • Manage Network Security Across Multiple Kubernetes Clusters
  • Enforce a Common Set of Security Controls Across Multiple Clusters
  • Detect and Alert on Unauthorized Changes and Other Attack Vectors
  • Self-Service Troubleshooting for End Users
  • Detect and Prevent Malicious Data Exfiltration

Manage Network Security Across Multiple Kubernetes Clusters

As the adoption of Kubernetes continues to accelerate, our customers are seeing the number of clusters in their environments rapidly multiplying. This has created a management challenge for IT Ops teams who are constantly pushed to find ways Continue reading

Why I’m Excited to Join Cloudflare as its First CIO

Why I’m Excited to Join Cloudflare as its First CIO
Why I’m Excited to Join Cloudflare as its First CIO

I am delighted to share that I have joined Cloudflare as its first Chief Information Officer to help scale the company in this new phase of its business. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be joining Cloudflare, and I am grateful for the opportunity to do my part to help build a better Internet.

At one of my previous companies, I made a bet on Cloudflare to equip us with security and performance solutions across a very decentralized global set of products and services. This is something that would have been very difficult without a cloud solution like Cloudflare’s. Since then I’ve been watching Cloudflare grow, and have always been very impressed by the speed of innovation and transparency, but also how Cloudflare operates: doing the right thing, with integrity, and above all building trust with customers and partners. The “do the right thing, even if it’s hard” mentality that I saw from Cloudflare since I started doing business with them as a customer, was key for me. When I heard that Cloudflare was looking for its first CIO I was excited to have a discussion to see if I could help.

During the interview process I got a sense Continue reading

Getting Rusty

Early this year I wrote about returning to first principles. I think this desire to dive deeper is a natural continuation of my goal of becoming a more well-rounded technologist. While it’s good to know and exploit your strengths, I think it’s also healthy to try and fill gaps where you see them, and I feel this is an area that warrants some focus for me. One way that I’ll be working towards this focus in 2020 is learning Rust.

Daily Roundup: Coronavirus Cancels More Tech Events

Coronavirus canceled more tech events; Equinix paid $335 million for Packet; and Rakuten Mobile...

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Did We Just Attend the Last Trade Show Ever at RSA?

Security professionals tend to be at least a moderately paranoid bunch, and adding a real virus to...

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Xilinx SmartNIC Targets Tier-2 Cloud Providers, Telcos

Xilinx claims its smartNIC will allow customers to offload 90% of Open vSwitch processing from the...

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Rakuten Mobile Dismisses Open RAN Skeptics

The open RAN framework is 40% cheaper than traditional telecommunication infrastructure, according...

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Coronavirus Forces Google Cloud Next to Go Digital

The company is moving the event to an all-digital experience, and there will not be any keynotes or...

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  • Stateful JavaScript Apps. Effortlessly add state Continue reading

Operators Face Unproven Edge Computing Business Models

Nokia Software CTO Ron Haberman likened the potential business models for mobile edge computing to...

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GTT Focuses On ‘Connecting People’ Amid Infrastructure Sell Off

"We found out with the acquisitions of Interoute and Hibernia that the development of...

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