Inside the Entropy

Randomness, randomness everywhere;
Nor any verifiable entropy.

Generating random outcomes is an essential part of everyday life; from lottery drawings and constructing competitions, to performing deep cryptographic computations. To use randomness, we must have some way to 'sample' it. This requires interpreting some natural phenomenon (such as a fair dice roll) as an event that generates some random output. From a computing perspective, we interpret random outputs as bytes that we can then use in algorithms (such as drawing a lottery) to achieve the functionality that we want.

The sampling of randomness securely and efficiently is a critical component of all modern computing systems. For example, nearly all public-key cryptography relies on the fact that algorithms can be seeded with bytes generated from genuinely random outcomes.

In scientific experiments, a random sampling of results is necessary to ensure that data collection measurements are not skewed. Until now, generating random outputs in a way that we can verify that they are indeed random has been very difficult; typically involving taking a variety of statistical measurements.

During Crypto week, Cloudflare is releasing a new public randomness beacon as part of the launch of the League of Entropy. The League of Entropy is Continue reading

Survey: Data-center staffing shortage remains challenging

It’s getting harder to find people to design, build and manage data centers.The sector is facing a staffing crisis, said Andy Lawrence, executive director of research at Uptime Institute, which just released its annual data-center survey. “We all know that that the data-center skills shortage is real. I think what we’re seeing in this data is that it’s getting a little worse,” Lawrence said. Learn more about network jobs What’s hot in network certifications How to boost collaboration between network and security teams SDN, programmable networks change the role of network engineers Top storage skills to boost your salary This year, 61 percent of respondents said they've had significant difficulty retaining or recruiting staff, up from 55 percent last year.To read this article in full, please click here

Survey: Data-center staffing shortage remains challenging

It’s getting harder to find people to design, build and manage data centers.The sector is facing a staffing crisis, says Andy Lawrence, executive director of research at Uptime Institute, which just released its annual data-center survey. “We all know that that the data-center skills shortage is real. I think what we’re seeing in this data is that it’s getting a little worse,” Lawrence says. Learn more about network jobs What’s hot in network certifications How to boost collaboration between network and security teams SDN, programmable networks change the role of network engineers Top storage skills to boost your salary This year, 61 percent of respondents said they've had significant difficulty retaining or recruiting staff, up from 55 percent last year.To read this article in full, please click here

Nvidia Makes Arm A Peer To X86 And Power For GPU Acceleration

Creating the Tesla GPU compute platform has taken Nvidia the better part of a decade and a half, and it has culminated in a software stack comprised of various HPC and AI frameworks, the CUDA parallel programming environment, compilers from Nvidia’s PGI division and their OpenACC extensions as well as open source GCC compilers, and various other tools that together account for tens of millions of lines of code and tens of thousands of individual APIs. …

Nvidia Makes Arm A Peer To X86 And Power For GPU Acceleration was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

How Microsoft Azure Orchestration System Crashed My Demos

One of the first things I realized when I started my Azure journey was that the Azure orchestration system is incredibly slow. For example, it takes almost 40 seconds to display six routes from per-VNIC routing table. Imagine trying to troubleshoot a problem and having to cope with 30-second delay on every single SHOW command. Cisco IGS/R was faster than that.

If you’re old enough you might remember working with VT100 terminals (or an equivalent) connected to 300 baud modems… where typing too fast risked getting the output out-of-sync resulting in painful screen repaints (here’s an exercise for the youngsters: how long does it take to redraw an 80x24 character screen over a 300 bps connection?). That’s exactly how I felt using Azure CLI - the slow responses I was getting were severely hampering my productivity.

Supercomputing Coiled To Spring To Exascale

If you want to rank in the world of supercomputing – as national and state governments as well as academic and research institutions most certainly do to prove their worth for research and development – then you need to have at least a petaflops ante now to play the game. …

Supercomputing Coiled To Spring To Exascale was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Towards multiverse databases

Towards multiverse databases Marzoev et al., HotOS’19

A typical backing store for a web application contains data for many users. The application makes queries on behalf of an authenticated user, but it is up to the application itself to make sure that the user only sees data they are entitled to see.

Any frontend can access the whole store, regardless of the application user consuming the results. Therefore, frontend code is responsible for permission checks and privacy-preserving transformations that protect user’s data. This is dangerous and error-prone, and has caused many real-world bugs… the trusted computing base (TCB) effectively includes the entire application.

The central idea behind multiverse databases is to push the data access and privacy rules into the database itself. The database takes on responsibility for authorization and transformation, and the application retains responsibility only for authentication and correct delegation of the authenticated principal on a database call. Such a design rules out an entire class of application errors, protecting private data from accidentally leaking.

It would be safer and easier to specify and transparently enforce access policies once, at the shared backend store interface. Although state-of-the-are databases have security features designed for exactly this purpose, Continue reading

Welcome to Crypto Week 2019

The Internet is an extraordinarily complex and evolving ecosystem. Its constituent protocols range from the ancient and archaic (hello FTP) to the modern and sleek (meet WireGuard), with a fair bit of everything in between. This evolution is ongoing, and as one of the most connected networks on the Internet, Cloudflare has a duty to be a good steward of this ecosystem. We take this responsibility to heart: Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. In this spirit, we are very proud to announce Crypto Week 2019.

Every day this week we’ll announce a new project or service that uses modern cryptography to build a more secure, trustworthy Internet. Everything we release this week will be free and immediately useful. This blog is a fun exploration of the themes of the week.

• Monday: Coming Soon
• Tuesday: Coming Soon
• Wednesday: Coming Soon
• Thursday: Coming Soon
• Friday: Coming Soon

The Internet of the Future

Many pieces of the Internet in use today were designed in a different era with different assumptions. The Internet’s success is based on strong foundations that support constant reassessment and improvement. Sometimes these improvements require deploying new protocols.

Performing an upgrade on a system Continue reading

Security Compliance at Cloudflare

Cloudflare believes trust is fundamental to helping build a better Internet. One way Cloudflare is helping our customers earn their users’ trust is through industry standard security compliance certifications and regulations.

Security compliance certifications are reports created by independent, third-party auditors that validate  and document a company’s commitment to security. These external auditors will conduct a rigorous review of a company’s technical environment and evaluate whether or not there are thorough controls - or safeguards - in place to protect the security, confidentiality, and availability of information stored and processed in the environment. SOC 2 was established by the American Institute of CPAs and is important to many of our U.S. companies, as it is a standardized set of requirements a company must meet in order to comply. Additionally, PCI and ISO 27001 are international standards. Cloudflare cares about achieving certifications because our adherence to these standards creates confidence to customers across the globe that we are committed to security. So, the Security team has been hard at work obtaining these meaningful compliance certifications.

Since the beginning of this year, we have been renewing our PCI DSS certification in February, achieving SOC 2 Type 1 compliance in March, obtaining Continue reading

Weekly Top Posts: 2019-06-16

1. VMware Inks Deal to Buys Avi Networks
2. Telefónica Launches a Fortinet-Powered SD-WAN Virtual Firewall
3. Podcast: Multi-Vendor Network Virtualization with EVPN
4. Cisco Aims to ‘Change the Paradigm’ for Operators with 5G
5. Riverbed Siphons Versa for a Stronger SD-WAN Flow

A free Argo Tunnel for your next project

Argo Tunnel lets you expose a server to the Internet without opening any ports. The service runs a lightweight process on your server that creates outbound tunnels to the Cloudflare network. Instead of managing DNS, network, and firewall complexity, Argo Tunnel helps administrators serve traffic from their origin through Cloudflare with a single command.

We built Argo Tunnel to remove the burden of securing and connecting servers to the Internet. This new model makes it easier to run a service in multi-cloud and hybrid deployments by replacing manual and error-prone work with a process that adds intelligence to the last-mile between Cloudflare and your origins or clusters. However, the service was previously only available to users with Cloudflare accounts. We want to make Argo Tunnel more accessible for any project.

Starting today, any user, even those without a Cloudflare account, can try this new method of connecting their server to the Internet. Argo Tunnel can now be used in a free model that will create a new URL, known only to you, that will proxy traffic to your server. We’re excited to make connecting a server to the Internet more accessible for everyone.

What is Argo Tunnel?

Argo Tunnel replaces Continue reading

Censorship vs. the memes

Heavy Networking 455: The Wonderful World Of Wireless – Beacons, Probes, SSIDs And More

The Packet Pushers' latest crash course podcast on wireless for wired engineers dives into beacons, roaming, SSIDs, the ugly reality of band steering, and more WLAN nerdery. Our guest is Chris Reed.

The post Heavy Networking 455: The Wonderful World Of Wireless – Beacons, Probes, SSIDs And More appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Docker Tools for Modernizing Traditional Applications

Over the past two years Docker has worked closely with customers to modernize portfolios of traditional applications with Docker container technology and Docker Enterprise, the industry-leading container platform. Such applications are typically monolithic in nature, run atop older operating systems such as Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2003, and are difficult to transition from on-premises data centers to the public cloud.

The Docker platform alleviates each of these pain points by decoupling an application from a particular operating system, enabling microservice architecture patterns, and fostering portability across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.

As the Modernizing Traditional Applications (MTA) program has matured, Docker has invested in tooling and methodologies that accelerate the transition to containers and decrease the time necessary to experience value from the Docker Enterprise platform. From the initial application assessment process to running containerized applications on a cluster, Docker is committed to improving the experience for customers on the MTA journey.

Application Discovery & Assessment

Enterprises develop and maintain exhaustive portfolios of applications. Such apps come in a myriad of languages, frameworks, and architectures developed by both first and third party development teams. The first step in the containerization journey is to determine which applications are Continue reading

Mininet flow analytics with custom scripts

sudo mn --custom sflow-rt/extras/sflow.py --link tc,bw=10 \
--topo tree,depth=2,fanout=2

sudo env ONOS=10.0.0.73 mn --custom sr.py,sflow-rt/extras/sflow.py \
--link tc,bw=10 --topo=sr '--controller=remote,ip=$ONOS,port=6653'

#!/usr/bin/python                                                                            
                                                                                             
from mininet.topo import Topo
from mininet.net import Mininet
from mininet.util import dumpNodeConnections
from mininet.log import setLogLevel

class SingleSwitchTopo(Topo):
    "Single switch connected to n hosts."
    def build(self, n=2):
        switch = self.addSwitch('s1')
        # Python's range(N) generates 0..N-1
        for h in range(n):
            host = self.addHost('h%s' % (h + 1))
            self.addLink(host, switch)

def simpleTest():
    "Create and test a simple network"
    topo = SingleSwitchTopo(n=4)
    net = Mininet(topo)
    net.start()
    print "Dumping host connections"
    dumpNodeConnections(net.hosts)
    print "Testing bandwidth between h1 and h4"
    h1, h4 = net.get( 'h1', 'h4' )
    net.iperf( (h1, h4) )
    net.stop()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    #  Continue reading

T-Mobile/Sprint Merger Hits State AG Hurdles

Does Riverbed’s Deal With Versa Signal a New SD-WAN Future?

VMware eyes Avi Networks for data-center software

VMware punched up its data-center network virtualization capabilities by announcing it would buy Avi Networks load balancing, analytics and application-delivery technology for an undisclosed amount.Founded in 2012 by a group of Cisco engineers and executives, Avi offers a variety of software-defined products and services including a software-based application delivery controller (ADC) and intelligent web-application firewall.  The software already integrates with VMware vCenter and NSX, OpenStack, third party SDN controllers, as well as Amazon AWS and Google Cloud Platform, Red Hat OpenShift and container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes and Docker.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware eyes Avi Networks for data-center software

VMware punched up its data-center network virtualization capabilities by announcing it would buy Avi Networks load balancing, analytics and application-delivery technology for an undisclosed amount.Founded in 2012 by a group of Cisco engineers and executives, Avi offers a variety of software-defined products and services including a software-based application delivery controller (ADC) and intelligent web-application firewall.  The software already integrates with VMware vCenter and NSX, OpenStack, third party SDN controllers, as well as Amazon AWS and Google Cloud Platform, Red Hat OpenShift and container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes and Docker.To read this article in full, please click here

AlefEdge Launches Manhattan Project for Open Edge Ecosystem