What is DNSSEC? What does it do? How widely is it deployed? In a technological environment where DNS attacks are common, Russ explores why DNSSEC isn’t as widely deployed as one would hope and provides some suggestions on how to get some momentum behind this important technology.
The post Short Take – DNSSEC Deployment appeared first on Network Collective.
The Pakistan School on Internet Governance 2018 (pkSIG) took place at the Regent Plaza Hotel in Karachi from 3-6 September 2018. It offered a four day intensive learning course, covering the political, legal, economic, socio-cultural, and technological dimensions of Internet Governance within the context of the Pakistani national imperatives. The program included theoretical sessions, role play, and participant engagement activities.
One of the objectives of the seminar was to develop a shared understanding of youth participation in Internet Governance by building expertise through the alumni of the school. A fellowship opportunity was offered to young applicants from the Sindh and Baluchistan provinces who presented a strong motivation to continue to work locally on IG issues after the pkSIG.
The involvement of students and young professionals, like the ICT engineer Sohaib Bukhari, is a successful example of meaningful participation in the shaping of the Internet. They are the generation that has been using the Internet since they were children, they are the ones who will be using it for the next 50 years. Sohaib was thrilled to have an open dialogue with the key stakeholders, while gaining access to comprehensive and structured knowledge on various aspects of the Internet Governance.
So, Continue reading
There was a lot of buzz this week when IBM announced they were acquiring Red Hat. A lot has been discussed about this in the past five days, including some coverage that I recorded with the Gestalt IT team on Monday. What I wanted to discuss quickly here is the aspirations that IBM now has for the cloud. Or, more appropriately, what they aren’t going to be doing.
It’s funny how many cloud providers started springing from the earth as soon as AWS started turning a profit. Microsoft and Google seem to be doing a good job of challenging for the crown. But the next tier down is littered with people trying to make a go of it. VMware with vCloud Air before they sold it. Oracle. Digital Ocean. IBM. And that doesn’t count the number of companies offering a specific function, like storage, and are calling themselves a cloud service provider.
IBM was well positioned to be a contender in the cloud service provider (CSP) market. Except they started the race with a huge disadvantage. IBM was a company that was focused on selling solutions to their customers. Just like Oracle, IBM’s primary customer was Continue reading
As happened earlier this year at IETF 102 in Montreal, DNS privacy will receive a large focus in the DNSOP, DPRIVE and DNSSD working groups. Given the critical role DNS plays as part of the “public core” of the Internet in linking names and identifiers to IP addresses, the DNS must have stronger security and privacy controls. As part of our Rough Guide to IETF 103, here’s a quick view on what’s happening in the world of DNS.
Note – all times below are Indochina Time (ICT), which is UTC+7.
The DNS sessions at IETF 103 start on Monday afternoon from 13:50-15:50 with the DNS Operations (DNSOP) Working Group. As per usual, DNSOP has a packed agenda. The major security/privacy-related drafts include:
A cloud-native approach offers an agile environment enabling organizations to meet ever-increasing customer demands and expectations. This allows companies to grow a product, service, or idea and deploy all these things as quickly as business plans change.
I long while ago I stumbled upon an excellent resource describing why distributed systems are hard (what I happened to be claiming years ago when OpenFlow was at the peak of the hype cycle ;)… lost it and found it again a few weeks ago.
If you want to understand why networking is hard (apart from the obvious MacGyver reasons) read it several times; here are just a few points:
Read more ...Hi,
Yesterday I took the AWS Solutions Architect Associate and passed it which means I’m now certified. I started studying for this exam around the August time frame. I had wanted to get some exposure to public cloud to broaden my skill set and AWS was the natural one to go after first considering their dominant position on the market. My goal is to do the networking specialty in order to know all of the networking products inside of AWS. I also have a project I’m working on now in AWS which helps with both motivation, knowledge and hands-on experience.
So, what was the exam like?
I don’t know if it was pure shock at first but I felt very uneasy in the beginning of the exam. The questions I got felt very different to the material and questions I had based my studies on. After a while I felt a bit better but it was still a tough exam for me. I had to really think through all of my answers and only a couple of questions, mostly the ones on networking, I felt confident answering immediately. The exam did feel balanced though covering a broad range of topics Continue reading
National-security experts have been warning of terrorist cyberattacks for 15 years. Why hasn’t one happened yet?As a pen-tester who has broken into power grids and found 0dayss in control center systems, I thought I'd write up some comments.
The FuzzyLog: a partially ordered shared log Lockerman et al., OSDI’18
If you want to build a distributed system then having a distributed shared log as an abstraction to build upon — one that gives you an agreed upon total order for all events — is such a big help that it’s practically cheating! (See the “Can’t we all just agree” mini-series of posts for some of the background on consensus).
Services built over a shared log are simple, compact layers that map a high-level API to append/read operations on the shared log, which acts as the source of strong consistency, durability, failure atomicity, and transactional isolation. For example, a shared log version of ZooKeeper uses 1K lines of code, an order of magnitude lower than the original system.
There’s a catch of course. System-wide total orders are expensive to maintain. Sometimes it may be impossible (e.g. in the event of a network partition). But perhaps we don’t always need a total ordering. Oftentimes for example causal consistency is strong enough. FuzzyLog aims to provide the simplicity of a shared log without imposing a total order: it provides partial ordering instead. It’s designed for a world Continue reading
The 103rd meeting of the IETF starts tomorrow in Bangkok which is the first time that an IETF meeting has been held in the city.
The Internet Society’s Internet Technology Team is as always highlighting the latest IPv6, DNSSEC, Securing BGP, TLS, and IoT related developments, and we’ll also be covering DNS Privacy and NTP Security from now on. This is discussed in detail in our Rough Guide to IETF 103, but we’ll also be bringing you daily previews of what’s happening each day as the week progresses.
Below are the sessions that we’ll be covering in the coming week. Note this post was written in advance so please check the official IETF 103 agenda for any updates, room changes, or final details.
Monday, 5 November 2018
Tuesday, 6 November 2018
Building virtualised network topologies has been one of the best ways to learn new technologies and to test new designs before implementing them on a production network. There are plenty of tools that can help build arbitrary network topologies, some with an interactive GUI (e.g. GNS3 or EVE-NG/Unetlab) and some “headless”, with text-based configuration files (e.g. vrnetlab or topology-converter). All of these tools work by spinning up multiple instances of virtual devices and interconnecting them according to a user-defined topology.
Most of these tools were primarily designed to work on a single host. This may work well for a relatively small topology but may become a problem as the number of virtual devices grows. Let’s take Juniper vMX as an example. From the official hardware requirements page, the smallest vMX instance will require:
This does not include the resources consumed by the underlying hypervisor, which can easily eat up another vCPU + 2GB of RAM. It’s easy to imagine how quickly Continue reading
Arista also said that due to the tariffs on some Chinese components that have been implemented by the U.S. government, it is adding a universal 3.3 percent add-on charge for worldwide customers.
The software initially supported AWS and Azure, and the company extended this cost-comparison and governance tool to on-premises Nutanix environments.
Cisco developed a four-step model for IT operations maturity showing where organizations are now and where they would like to be in two years.