MadMax: surviving out-of-gas conditions in Ethereum smart contracts

MadMax: surviving out-of-gas conditions in ethereum smart contracts Grech et al., OOPSLA’18

We’re transitioning to look at a selection of papers from the recent OOPSLA conference this week. MadMax won a distinguished paper award, and makes a nice bridge from the CCS blockchain papers we were looking at last week.

Analysis and verification of smart contracts is a high-value task, possibly more so than in any other programming setting. The combination of monetary value and public availability makes the early detection of vulnerabilities a task of paramount importance. (Detection may occur after contract deployment. Despite the code immutability, which prevents bug fixes, discovering a vulnerability before an attacker may exploit it could enable a trusted third party to move vulnerable funds to safety).

MadMax is in the same vein as Securify, performing EVM bytecode analysis using Datalog (also with Soufflé) to infer security issues in contracts. In this instance, MadMax focuses on detecting vulnerabilities caused by out-of-gas conditions. The paper touches on some nice reusable building blocks (e.g. Vandal). I could easily see Vandal + Soufflé becoming a standard foundation for powerful EVM-based smart contract analysis.

MadMax is available on GitHub at https://github.com/nevillegreech/MadMax.

MaxMax Continue reading

Routers Getting Routered – Silver Peak SD-WAN

Silver Peak SD-WAN. Routers Getting Routered – One of the Silver Peak’s Slogan for SD-WAN. First, let’s have a look at the video below  that the Slogan of “Routers Getting Routered” seems marketing, but actually it has a technical meaning behind it.     Video : Silver Peak Youtube Channel    I attended the last …

Continue reading "Routers Getting Routered – Silver Peak SD-WAN"

The post Routers Getting Routered – Silver Peak SD-WAN appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Do I Need a WAN?

In the latest Network Break, Network Break 213 from Packet Pushers, they discussed some of the latest news in networking, such as Amazon Outpost. With the rise of SaaS applications, the questions was also raised, do I even need a WAN?

Let’s assume you are running Office365. Your e-mail and office application is in the cloud. You are using Salesforce for your CRM. You ERP is also cloud-hosted. You’ve moved pretty much all of your previously internal apps to the cloud. Do you still need a WAN? I would argue yes. Considering all the applications mentioned previously have been moved, what do we still have left?

All though we’ve been talking about paperless societies for ages, have you ever seen an office environment without a printer? Neither have I. Your printers likely need to reach a print server.  Do you have Active Directory? Would you be comfortable putting it entirely in the cloud? How do you provision PC images? Do you use something like SCCM? Do you have lighting, doors, larms etc that are connected to the network? Are all of your stored files in the cloud? Probably not depending on how sensitive they are. Do your offices Continue reading

Network automation as network architecture

I spent a very large part of my professional life as a network engineer working on automation.  A journey that started back in 1996 when I and a few colleagues engineered Bloomberg’s first global IP WAN.  That WAN evolved into the most recognized (and agile) WAN in the financial services industry.  And that automation which started small, over the years evolved into a very lean and flexible model-based provisioning library, with the various programs (provisioning, health-checking, discovery, etc) that were built on top.  The automation library drove a high function multi-service network with less than 15K of OO code, and with support for 6+ different NOS and 100+ different unique packet forwarding FRUs.  It was quite unique in that I have yet to see some of its core concepts repeated elsewhere.  

Over the thousands of hours I spent evolving and fine tuning that network automation engine, I’ve learned quite a lot along the way.  I hope to write about some of my high level learnings over the next year.  In this blog entry, I want to share my perspective on the foundational basis of any proper network automation — this is network Continue reading

BiB 067: Custom APIs For Business Logic With BlueCat Gateway

BlueCat Networks offers a free add-on product to their DDI (DNS, DHCP, IPAM) product called Gateway. Gateway is a platform customers can use to create their own custom APIs that make sense for their business. Put another way, Gateway provides a REST API endpoint for other applications within the business to talk to. That makes for some interesting workflow capabilities.

The post BiB 067: Custom APIs For Business Logic With BlueCat Gateway appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Cumulus Linux in the enterprise campus.

As most know, Cumulus Linux was originally intended for data center switching and routing but over the years, our customer base has requested that we expand into the enterprise campus feature set too. Slowly, we’ve done just that.

With this expansion though, there are a few items that IT managers tend to take for granted in an all Cisco environment that may need some extra attention when using Cumulus Linux as a campus switch. This is especially the case when it comes to IEEE 802.1x, desk phones, etc.

Most of the phones we inter-operate with have been of the Cisco variety and quite often, those phones are connected to Cisco switches. There are a few tweaks from the default Cumulus settings that need to be called out in this environment and we’ll now go over what those are and how you can tweek them.

Cisco IP Phones TLV change

Cisco IP phones may revert to a different VLAN after initial negotiation. One of our enterprise customers found that according to a Cisco tech note on LLDP-MED and CDP, CDP should be disabled on non-Cisco switches connecting to Cisco phones.

To eliminate this behavior, make the following adjustment to the Continue reading

Weekend Reads 120618

Paris Traceroute allows you to deterministically measure particular paths by setting particular flow IDs — effectively setting combinations in packet headers to be treated consistently by routers on a path. Using this trick to run many traceroutes with different flow IDs to a target may reveal an entire topology, but without extra logic, it may involve tens of thousands of traceroute packets to do so. Many of those packets will be sent over hops that never change, making those packets redundant while also consuming bandwidth and time. —Kevin Vermeulen @APNIC

So, when people talk about serverless, what does it mean? Well, it doesn’t mean servers are GONE. Of course not: That “client-server model” is still the backbone of how things are getting done. Serverless refers to a developer’s ability to code, deploy, and create applications without having to know how to do the rest of it, like rack the servers, patch the operating system, and create container images. —Jen Wike Huger @opensource.com

The average size of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks — where attackers seek to take down a website, application, or infrastructure by flooding it with requests — increased by 24% in 2018. In addition, the attack Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For December 7th, 2018

Wake up! It's HighScalability time:

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please support me on Patreon. I'd really appreciate it. Know anyone looking for a simple book explaining the cloud? Then please recommend my well reviewed (31 reviews on Amazon and 72 on Goodreads!) book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love it and you'll be their hero forever. And if you know someone with hearing problems they might find Live CC very useful.

 

Weekly Show 419: Benchmarking Public Cloud Network Performance With ThousandEyes (Sponsored)

You need to know a cloud provider's network performance before you spin up workloads because the end user impact is measurable. On today's Weekly Show, sponsor ThousandEyes breaks down latency, jitter, and performance numbers for AWS, Azure, and GCP.

The post Weekly Show 419: Benchmarking Public Cloud Network Performance With ThousandEyes (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Future Thinking: Orla Lynskey on Data in the Age of Consolidation

Last year, the Internet Society unveiled the 2017 Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future. The interactive report identifies the drivers affecting tomorrow’s Internet and their impact on Media & Society, Digital Divides, and Personal Rights & Freedoms. We interviewed Orla Lynskey to hear her perspective on the forces shaping the Internet’s future.

Orla Lynskey is an associate professor of law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her primary area of research interest is European Union data protection law. Her monograph, The Foundations of EU Data Protection Law (Oxford University Press, 2015), explores the potential and limits of individual control over personal data, or “informational self-determination’” in the data protection framework. More recently, her work has focused on collective approaches to data protection rights and mechanisms to counterbalance asymmetries of power in the online environment. Lynskey is an editor of International Data Privacy Law and the Modern Law Review and is a member of the EU Commission’s multistakeholder expert group on GDPR. She holds an LLB from Trinity College, Dublin, an LLM from the College of Europe (Bruges) and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Before entering academia, she worked as a competition lawyer in Brussels Continue reading

1 … 1,396 1,397 1,398 1,399 1,400 … 3,860