My Team’s Blogs

I’m thankful to have the opportunity to work with an amazing team. Many of my teammates also produce some very useful content via their own sites, and so I thought it might be useful to my readers to share a list of links to my teammates’ blogs.

Without further ado, here is a list of my teammates who have a blog; each entry is a link to the respective site (these are presented in no particular order):

I know I’ve gained valuable insight from some of their content, and I hope you do as well.

ACI MultiPod – Enable Standby APIC

APIC Controller Cluster You actually need three APIC controller servers to get the cluster up and running in complete and redundant ACI system. You can actually work with only two APICs and you will still have a cluster quorum and will be able to change ACI Fabric configuration. Loosing One Site In the MultiPod, those three controllers need to be distributed so that one of them is placed in the secondary site. The idea is that you still have a chance to keep your configuration on one remaining APIC while losing completely primary site with two APICs. On the other

The post ACI MultiPod – Enable Standby APIC appeared first on How Does Internet Work.

Last Week on ipSpace.net (2019W14)

Last Thursday I started another experiment: a series of live webinar sessions focused on business aspects of networking technologies. The first session expanded on the idea of three paths of enterprise IT. It covered the commoditization of IT and networking in particular, vendor landscape, various attempts at segmenting customers, and potential long-term Enterprise IT paths. Recording is already online and currently available with standard subscription.

Although the attendance was lower than usual, attendees thoroughly enjoyed it – one of them sent me this: “the value of ipSpace.net is that you cut through the BS”. Mission accomplished ;)

How bad can it git? Characterizing secret leakage in public GitHub repositories

How bad can it git? Characterizing secret leakage in public GitHub repositories Meli et al., NDSS’19

On the one hand you might say there’s no new news here. We know that developers shouldn’t commit secrets, and we know that secrets leaked to GitHub can be discovered and exploited very quickly. On the other hand, this study goes much deeper, and also provides us with some very actionable information.

…we go far beyond noting that leakage occurs, providing a conservative longitudinal analysis of leakage, as well as analyses of root causes and the limitations of current mitigations.

In my opinion, the best time to catch secrets is before they are ever committed in the first place. A git pre-commit hook using the regular expressions from this paper’s appendix looks like a pretty good investment to me. The pre-commit hook approach is taken by TruffleHog, though as of the time this paper was written, TruffleHog’s secret detection mechanisms were notably inferior (detecting only 25-29%) to those developed in this work (§ VII.D). You might also want to look at git-secrets which does this for AWS keys, and is extensible with additional patterns. For a belt and braces approach, also Continue reading

DNS Privacy at IETF 104

From time to time the IETF seriously grapples with its role with respect to technology relating to users' privacy. Should the IETF publish standard specifications of technologies that facilitate third party eavesdropping on communications or should it refrain from working on such technologies? Should the IETF take further steps and publish standard specifications of technologies that directly impede various forms of third party eavesdropping on communications? Is a consistent position from the IETF on personal privacy preferred? Or should the IETF be as agnostic as possible and publish protocol specifications based solely on technical coherency and interoperability without particular regard to issues of personal privacy? This issue surfaced at IETF 104 in the context of discussions of DNS over HTTPS, or DOH.

Celebrating 50 Years of the RFCs That Define How the Internet Works

First page of RFC 1

50 years ago today, on 7 April 1969, the very first “Request for Comments” (RFC) document was published. Titled simply “Host Software”, RFC 1 was written by Steve Crocker to document how packets would be sent from computer to computer in what was then the very early ARPANET. [1]

Steve and the other early authors were just circulating ideas and trying to figure out how to connect the different devices and systems of the early networks that would evolve into the massive network of networks we now call the Internet. They were not trying to create formal standards – they were just writing specifications that would help them be able to connect their computers. Little did they know then that the system they developed would come to later define the standards used to build the Internet.

Today there are over 8,500 RFCs whose publication is managed through a formal process by the RFC Editor team. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is responsible for the vast majority (but not all) of the RFCs – and there is strong process through which documents move within the IETF from ideas (“Internet-Drafts” or “I-Ds”) into published standards or informational documents[2].

50 years Continue reading

Feature Friday: A Chat With Security Experts

DockerCon brings industry leaders and experts of the container world to one event where they share their knowledge, experience and guidance. This year is no different. For the next few weeks, we’re going to highlight a few of our amazing speakers and the talks they will be leading.

In this second highlight, we have several industry experts on container and application security that we’re excited to have sharing their knowledge at DockerCon. We’re going to have sessions covering network security, a dissection of a real world Kubernetes vulnerability (and what to do about it), encrypted containers, and the new AWS Firecracker “micro-VM” for containers, just to name a few.

In case you missed it, you can also see our first speaker highlight here, featuring storage, service mesh and networking experts.

 

Zero Trust Networks Come to Docker Enterprise Kubernetes

More on their session here.

 

Spike Curtis 

Tigera Software Developer

Brent Salisbury 

Docker Technical Alliances

What is your breakout about?

Brent: Docker Enterprise with Calico for networking being used in conjunction with Istio is an exciting intersection of securing various layers of networking – all from a single policy interface.

Spike: The Docker-Calico-Istio combination Continue reading

How to setup an encrypted SOCKS proxy using stunnel

Why using SOCKS

There are times in which setting up a complete VPN tunnel might be an overkill (or not be an option at all).

For example, assume the followings:

  • You don’t want to tunnel all the traffic, just want to do so for your browsers.
  • Your OS is running under a limited account and doesn’t allow creation of tun interfaces.
  • Your provider does not allow setting up a tun device.
  • You want to securely surf the web on your old android device that doesn’t support tunneling.

stunnel can be used on your Android phone. SOCKS functionality could then be directly used in your phone for apps that support it: Firefox, Telegram, etc.

To see how to install and setup stunnel on android, take a look at:

How to run stunnel on your android device

These are just couple of examples. In such cases, setting up a SOCKS proxy might just do the trick.

Another interesting aspect of SOCKS proxy, is that after the initial per each connection handshake, it doesn’t add much overhead to the underlying traffic.

Overhead might not look like a big deal at first, but it adds up. This is specially true when you have a Continue reading

39 – DCNM 11.1 and VXLAN EVPN Multi-site Update

Dear Network experts,

It took a while to post this update on DCNM 11.1 due to other priorities, but I should admit it’s a shame due to all great features that came with DCNM 11.1. As mentioned in the previous post, DCNM 11.1 brings a lot of great improvements.

Hereafter is a summary of the top LAN fabric enhancements that comes with DCNM 11.1 for LAN Fabric.

Feel free to look at the Release-notes for an exhaustive list of New Features and Enhancements in Cisco DCNM, Release 11.1(1)

Fabric Builder, fabric devices and fabric underlay networks

  • Configuration Compliance display side-by-side of existing and pending configuration before deployment.

  • vPC support for BGWs (VXLAN EVPN Multi-site) and standalone fabrics.

Brownfield Migration

  • Transition an existing VXLAN fabric management into DCN.

Interfaces

  • Port-channel, vPC, subinterface, and loopback interfaces can be added and eddited with an external fabric devices.

  • Cisco DCNM 11.1(1) specific template enhancements are made for interfaces.

Overlay Network/VRF provisioning

  • Networks and VRFs deployment can be deploy automatically at the Multi-site Domain level from Site to Site in one single action.

External Fabric

  • Switches can be added to the external fabric. Inter-Fabric Connections (IFCs) can be created Continue reading

Save the Date: Hackathon@AIS

The third Hackathon@AIS will take place in Kampala, Uganda on the 19th and 20th of June 2019. The Hackathon@AIS is an event aimed at exposing engineers from the African region to Internet Standards development and usage. This will be the third event in the series following successful events held in Nairobi (2017) and Dakar (2018), each alongside the Africa Internet Summit (AIS).

See what was covered in 2017 and 2018 Hackathons@AIS here:
2017 Hackathon@AIS
2018 Hackathon@AIS

The event is targeted at network/system engineers, software developers, and/or computer science students to introduce them to existing and evolving Internet standards development that can help further their careers.

Applications for the event will open in April 2019.

Fellowships will be awarded to strong applicants where possible.

Applications will close on 12 May 2019.

For more information please contact Kevin Chege: [email protected].

Read testimonials from the 2018 Hackathon@AIS fellows.

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