SD-WAN Products Impress Amid Wide Price Disparity
According to NSS Labs' testing methodology, Silver Peak's SD-WAN product was 1,623% more expensive...
Copyright 2019 SDxCentral, LLC; For non-commercial use
Exascale System At Oak Ridge Will Blaze New Storage Path
When Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) installs its 1.5-exaflops Frontier supercomputer in a couple of years, it’s likely to be the most powerful system in the US, if not the world. …
Exascale System At Oak Ridge Will Blaze New Storage Path was written by Michael Feldman at .
Composability Melts Into Rack Servers
For enterprises that want to take their compute, storage and networking, create fluid pools of datacenter resources and then use software to deploy and use them as needed, Hewlett Packard Enterprise for the past few years have offered them its Synergy composable appliances that include all that hardware capabilities as well as software like OneView for IT management. …
Composability Melts Into Rack Servers was written by Jeffrey Burt at .
Helium – Venture Capital Con Job or Viable Business ?
The company 'Helium' appears to be attempting to build a national Low Power WAN (LPWAN) carrier network by asking normal people to buy and operate network nodes for them. The hotspot may be purchased directly or bundled with 3rd party IOT products and become nodes in a proprietary LPWAN that mines tokens in a blockchain.
The post Helium – Venture Capital Con Job or Viable Business ? appeared first on EtherealMind.
Cisco and IBM See More Kubernetes as the Answer to App Migration
“Kubernetes is front and center of the partnership as all of these changes are predicated by the...
Copyright 2019 SDxCentral, LLC; For non-commercial use
5G Won’t Affect Weather Forecasting Service, Says GSMA
Industry association seeks to debunk ‘false claims’ that it says threaten the future of 5G.
Copyright 2019 SDxCentral, LLC; For non-commercial use
Sterlite’s Ayush Sharma Talks PODS and the Future of Networking
Hear from Ayush Sharma, Sterlite Technologies (STL) head of programmable networking and...
Copyright 2019 SDxCentral, LLC; For non-commercial use
Cranky Old Network Engineer Complains About The Youth Of Today
If you’re very old (like me) you’ll likely remember the halcyon days when IP routing was not enabled by default on Cisco routers. Younger gamers may find this hard to believe, which makes it even stranger when I keep bumping into an apparently common misconception about how routers work. Let’s take a look at what I’m beefing about.
No IP Routing?
To put this in context for the younger gamers, it’s worth noting that at the time, a typical “enterprise” might be running IP, but was equally likely to run IPX, AppleTalk, DECnet or some other protocol which may – or may not – support routing. Yes, there was life before the Internet Protocol became ubiquitous. If you’re curious, the command to enable IP routing is, well:
ip routing
Guess how IPX routing was enabled:
ipx routing
Appletalk?
appletalk routing
DECnet Phase IV?
decnet [network-number] routing <decnet-address>
Ok, so the pattern isn’t entirely consistent, but it’s close enough. In one way things are much simpler now because routers tend to handle IP (and IPv6) and nothing else. On the other hand there are so many more IP-related features available, I think we should just be grateful that there’s only one Continue reading
The Quantum Menace
Over the last few decades, the word ‘quantum’ has become increasingly popular. It is common to find articles, reports, and many people interested in quantum mechanics and the new capabilities and improvements it brings to the scientific community. This topic not only concerns physics, since the development of quantum mechanics impacts on several other fields such as chemistry, economics, artificial intelligence, operations research, and undoubtedly, cryptography.
This post begins a trio of blogs describing the impact of quantum computing on cryptography, and how to use stronger algorithms resistant to the power of quantum computing.
- This post introduces quantum computing and describes the main aspects of this new computing model and its devastating impact on security standards; it summarizes some approaches to securing information using quantum-resistant algorithms.
- Due to the relevance of this matter, we present our experiments on a large-scale deployment of quantum-resistant algorithms.
- Our third post introduces CIRCL, open-source Go library featuring optimized implementations of quantum-resistant algorithms and elliptic curve-based primitives.
All of this is part of Cloudflare’s Crypto Week 2019, now fasten your seatbelt and get ready to make a quantum leap.
What is Quantum Computing?
Back in 1981, Richard Feynman raised the question about what Continue reading
The Quantum Menace
Over the last few decades, the word ‘quantum’ has become increasingly popular. It is common to find articles, reports, and many people interested in quantum mechanics and the new capabilities and improvements it brings to the scientific community. This topic not only concerns physics, since the development of quantum mechanics impacts on several other fields such as chemistry, economics, artificial intelligence, operations research, and undoubtedly, cryptography.
This post begins a trio of blogs describing the impact of quantum computing on cryptography, and how to use stronger algorithms resistant to the power of quantum computing.
- This post introduces quantum computing and describes the main aspects of this new computing model and its devastating impact on security standards; it summarizes some approaches to securing information using quantum-resistant algorithms.
- Due to the relevance of this matter, we present our experiments on a large-scale deployment of quantum-resistant algorithms.
- Our third post introduces CIRCL, open-source Go library featuring optimized implementations of quantum-resistant algorithms and elliptic curve-based primitives.
All of this is part of Cloudflare’s Crypto Week 2019, now fasten your seatbelt and get ready to make a quantum leap.
What is Quantum Computing?
Back in 1981, Richard Feynman raised the question about what Continue reading
Towards Post-Quantum Cryptography in TLS
We live in a completely connected society. A society connected by a variety of devices: laptops, mobile phones, wearables, self-driving or self-flying things. We have standards for a common language that allows these devices to communicate with each other. This is critical for wide-scale deployment – especially in cryptography where the smallest detail has great importance.
One of the most important standards-setting organizations is the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which is hugely influential in determining which standardized cryptographic systems see worldwide adoption. At the end of 2016, NIST announced it would hold a multi-year open project with the goal of standardizing new post-quantum (PQ) cryptographic algorithms secure against both quantum and classical computers.
Many of our devices have very different requirements and capabilities, so it may not be possible to select a “one-size-fits-all” algorithm during the process. NIST mathematician, Dustin Moody, indicated that institute will likely select more than one algorithm:
“There are several systems in use that could be broken by a quantum computer - public-key encryption and digital signatures, to take two examples - and we will need different solutions for each of those systems.”
Initially, NIST selected 82 candidates for further consideration from Continue reading
Towards Post-Quantum Cryptography in TLS
We live in a completely connected society. A society connected by a variety of devices: laptops, mobile phones, wearables, self-driving or self-flying things. We have standards for a common language that allows these devices to communicate with each other. This is critical for wide-scale deployment – especially in cryptography where the smallest detail has great importance.
One of the most important standards-setting organizations is the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which is hugely influential in determining which standardized cryptographic systems see worldwide adoption. At the end of 2016, NIST announced it would hold a multi-year open project with the goal of standardizing new post-quantum (PQ) cryptographic algorithms secure against both quantum and classical computers.
Many of our devices have very different requirements and capabilities, so it may not be possible to select a “one-size-fits-all” algorithm during the process. NIST mathematician, Dustin Moody, indicated that institute will likely select more than one algorithm:
“There are several systems in use that could be broken by a quantum computer - public-key encryption and digital signatures, to take two examples - and we will need different solutions for each of those systems.”
Initially, NIST selected 82 candidates for further consideration from Continue reading
Introducing CIRCL: An Advanced Cryptographic Library
As part of Crypto Week 2019, today we are proud to release the source code of a cryptographic library we’ve been working on: a collection of cryptographic primitives written in Go, called CIRCL. This library includes a set of packages that target cryptographic algorithms for post-quantum (PQ), elliptic curve cryptography, and hash functions for prime groups. Our hope is that it’s useful for a broad audience. Get ready to discover how we made CIRCL unique.
Cryptography in Go
We use Go a lot at Cloudflare. It offers a good balance between ease of use and performance; the learning curve is very light, and after a short time, any programmer can get good at writing fast, lightweight backend services. And thanks to the possibility of implementing performance critical parts in Go assembly, we can try to ‘squeeze the machine’ and get every bit of performance.
Cloudflare’s cryptography team designs and maintains security-critical projects. It's not a secret that security is hard. That's why, we are introducing the Cloudflare Interoperable Reusable Cryptographic Library - CIRCL. There are multiple goals behind CIRCL. First, we want to concentrate our efforts to implement cryptographic primitives in a single place. This makes it easier Continue reading
Introducing CIRCL: An Advanced Cryptographic Library
As part of Crypto Week 2019, today we are proud to release the source code of a cryptographic library we’ve been working on: a collection of cryptographic primitives written in Go, called CIRCL. This library includes a set of packages that target cryptographic algorithms for post-quantum (PQ), elliptic curve cryptography, and hash functions for prime groups. Our hope is that it’s useful for a broad audience. Get ready to discover how we made CIRCL unique.
Cryptography in Go
We use Go a lot at Cloudflare. It offers a good balance between ease of use and performance; the learning curve is very light, and after a short time, any programmer can get good at writing fast, lightweight backend services. And thanks to the possibility of implementing performance critical parts in Go assembly, we can try to ‘squeeze the machine’ and get every bit of performance.
Cloudflare’s cryptography team designs and maintains security-critical projects. It's not a secret that security is hard. That's why, we are introducing the Cloudflare Interoperable Reusable Cryptographic Library - CIRCL. There are multiple goals behind CIRCL. First, we want to concentrate our efforts to implement cryptographic primitives in a single place. This makes it easier Continue reading
Major Updates to Cisco Certifications Part III (CCNP)
What is changing for CCNP? And why?
Some of the problems that existed in the current CCNP were:
- No way of showing progress until you took all 3 exams and became CCNP certified, usually a 1+ year commitment
- Needed to pass CCNA before being able to become CCNP certified
- The certification wasn’t modular and it was a lot of work to update the certification
- Difficult to stay current with new technologies
Effective 24 February 2020, it will be possible to jump in at CCNP level, meaning that you don’t need to be CCNA certified to become a CCNP.
Instead of taking 3 exams, only 2 exams are needed, one Core exam and one concentration exam. You can take them in any order and you can also keep taking concentration exams to show you have skills in newer technologies such as SD-WAN. These concentration exams will show as badges.
Because the certification is now more modular, it will be easier to keep the certification up to date and to update it as technologies evolve and new ones come to the fore.
Another change is that the RS and Wireless track are now merged into CCNP Enterprise where the Core exam is Continue reading
Impact of Controller Failures in Software-Defined Networks
Christoph Jaggi sent me this observation during one of our SD-WAN discussions:
The centralized controller is another shortcoming of SD-WAN that hasn’t been really addressed yet. In a global WAN it can and does happen that a region might be cut off due to a cut cable or an attack. Without connection to the central SD-WAN controller the part that is cut off cannot even communicate within itself as there is no control plane…
A controller (or management/provisioning) system is obviously the central point of failure in any network, but we have to go beyond that and ask a simple question: “What happens when the controller cluster fails and/or when nodes lose connectivity to the controller?”
Read more ...