DeGrasse Tyson: Make Truth Great Again

Neil deGrasse Tyson tweets the following:
When people make comparisons with Orwell's "Ministry of Truth", he obtusely persists:
Given that Orwellian dystopias were the theme of this summer's DEF CON hacker conference, let's explore what's wrong with this idea.

Truth vs. "Truth"

I work in a corrupted industry, variously known as the "infosec" community or "cybersecurity" industry. It's a great example of how truth is corrupted into "Truth".

At a recent government policy meeting, I pointed out how vendors often downplay the risk of bugs (vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers). When vendors are notified of these bugs and release a patch to fix them, they often give a risk rating. These ratings are often too low, in order to protect the corporate reputation. The representative from Oracle claimed that they didn't do Continue reading

RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)

RDMA over Converged Ethernet is a network protocol that allows remote direct memory access (RDMA) over an Ethernet network. One of the benefits running RDMA over Ethernet is the visibility provided by standard sFlow instrumentation embedded in the commodity Ethernet switches used to build data center leaf and spine networks where RDMA is most prevalent.

The sFlow telemetry stream includes packet headers, sampled at line rate by the switch hardware. Hardware packet sampling allows the switch to monitor traffic at line rate on all ports, keeping up with the high speed data transfers associated with RoCE.

The diagram above shows the packet headers associated with RoCEv1 and RoCEv2 packets. Decoding the InfiniBand Global Routing Header (IB GRH) and InfiniBand Base Transport Header (IB BTH) allows an sFlow analyzer to report in detail on RoCE traffic.
The sFlow-RT real-time analytics engine recently added support for RoCE by decoding InfiniBand Global Routing and InfiniBand Base Transport fields. The screen capture of the sFlow-RT Flow-Trend application shows traffic associated with an RoCEv2 connection between two hosts, 10.10.2.22 and 10.10.2.52. The traffic consists of SEND and ACK messages exchanged as part of a reliable connection (RC Continue reading

Securing The Server, Inside And Out

Computing is hard enough, but the sophistication and proliferation of attacks on IT infrastructure, from the firewall moat surrounding the corporate network all the way down into the guts of the operating system kernel and deep into the speculative execution units on the physical processor, make the task of computing – with confidence – doubly difficult. …

Securing The Server, Inside And Out was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Reaction: Nerd Knobs and Open Source in Network Software

This is an interesting take on where we are in the data networking world—

Tech is commoditizing, meaning that vendors in the space are losing feature differentiation. That happens for a number of reasons, the most obvious of which is that you run out of useful features. Other reasons include the difficulty in making less-obvious features matter to buyers, lack of insight by vendors into what’s useful to start off with, and difficulty in getting media access for any story that’s not a promise of total revolution. Whatever the reason, or combination of reasons, it’s getting harder for network vendors to promote features they offer as the reasons to buy their stuff. What’s left, obviously, is price. —Tom Nolle @CIMI

There are things here I agree with, and things I don’t agree with.

Tech is commoditizing. I’ve talked about this before; I think networking is commoditizing at the device level, and the days of appliance based networking are behind us. But are networks themselves a commodity? Not any more than any other system.

We are running out of useful features, so vendors are losing feature differentiation. This one is going to take a little longer… When I first started in Continue reading

How Cloudflare protects customers from cache poisoning

How Cloudflare protects customers from cache poisoning

A few days ago, Cloudflare — along with the rest of the world — learned of a "practical" cache poisoning attack. In this post I’ll walk through the attack and explain how Cloudflare mitigated it for our customers. While any web cache is vulnerable to this attack, Cloudflare is uniquely able to take proactive steps to defend millions of customers.

In addition to the steps we’ve taken, we strongly recommend that customers update their origin web servers to mitigate vulnerabilities. Some popular vendors have applied patches that can be installed right away, including Drupal, Symfony, and Zend.

How a shared web cache works

Say a user requests a cacheable file, index.html. We first check if it’s in cache, and if it’s not not, we fetch it from the origin and store it. Subsequent users can request that file from our cache until it expires or gets evicted.

Although contents of a response can vary slightly between requests, customers may want to cache a single version of the file to improve performance:

How Cloudflare protects customers from cache poisoning

(See this support page for more info about how to cache HTML with Cloudflare.)

How do we know it’s the same file? We create something Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Security serves as an essential component to growing an enterprise with SD-WAN

As enterprises endeavor to expand domestic and global footprints, agile network infrastructure connectivity across geographies continues to prove an ongoing challenge. In particular, ensuring that data shared over these networks is protected from unauthorized access is a primary directive in today’s evolving cyber threat landscape. These often-contradictory demands call for IT decision makers to invest in innovation that will facilitate network flexibility and agility without compromising security, productivity or performance.This challenge begs a simple question. How can a WAN deliver the flexibility and agility necessary to help an organization grow without increasing exposure to data breaches and other security problems? After all, if the cost of convenience is increased network vulnerabilities, can it be considered a sound approach?To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Security serves as an essential component to growing an enterprise with SD-WAN

As enterprises endeavor to expand domestic and global footprints, agile network infrastructure connectivity across geographies continues to prove an ongoing challenge. In particular, ensuring that data shared over these networks is protected from unauthorized access is a primary directive in today’s evolving cyber threat landscape. These often-contradictory demands call for IT decision makers to invest in innovation that will facilitate network flexibility and agility without compromising security, productivity or performance.This challenge begs a simple question. How can a WAN deliver the flexibility and agility necessary to help an organization grow without increasing exposure to data breaches and other security problems? After all, if the cost of convenience is increased network vulnerabilities, can it be considered a sound approach?To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Security serves as an essential component to growing an enterprise with SD-WAN

As enterprises endeavor to expand domestic and global footprints, agile network infrastructure connectivity across geographies continues to prove an ongoing challenge. In particular, ensuring that data shared over these networks is protected from unauthorized access is a primary directive in today’s evolving cyber threat landscape. These often-contradictory demands call for IT decision makers to invest in innovation that will facilitate network flexibility and agility without compromising security, productivity or performance.This challenge begs a simple question. How can a WAN deliver the flexibility and agility necessary to help an organization grow without increasing exposure to data breaches and other security problems? After all, if the cost of convenience is increased network vulnerabilities, can it be considered a sound approach?To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: GitOps

You’ve written a new web application and would like it to be added to your organization’s web load balancer. The load balancer is complex; its configuration is maintained by highly trained experts on the network operations team. You file a ticket with the team, wait, wait, wait, have a discussion with the experts, wait, wait, wait, and finally your request is completed. Your application is now available, assuming they got it right on the first try. —Thomas A. Limoncelli @ACM

IDG Contributor Network: The state of the network is murky

Hybrid IT networking has come a long way in the past decade, as enterprises have gradually come to embrace and trust cloud computing. Yet, despite the growing popularity of both private and public clouds, many enterprise IT teams are still struggling with how to handle the resulting migration challenges.Originally envisioned as simply a way to reduce costs, migration to the cloud has escalated in large part due to a drive for greater agility and flexibility. In fact, according to a recent State of the Network global survey of more than 600 IT professionals, the top two reasons enterprises are moving to the cloud are to increase IT scalability and agility, and to improve service availability and reliability. The need to lower costs was ranked number four, tied with the desire to deliver new services faster.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The state of the network is murky

Hybrid IT networking has come a long way in the past decade, as enterprises have gradually come to embrace and trust cloud computing. Yet, despite the growing popularity of both private and public clouds, many enterprise IT teams are still struggling with how to handle the resulting migration challenges.Originally envisioned as simply a way to reduce costs, migration to the cloud has escalated in large part due to a drive for greater agility and flexibility. In fact, according to a recent State of the Network global survey of more than 600 IT professionals, the top two reasons enterprises are moving to the cloud are to increase IT scalability and agility, and to improve service availability and reliability. The need to lower costs was ranked number four, tied with the desire to deliver new services faster.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Securing microservice environments in a hostile world

At the present time, there is a remarkable trend for application modularization that splits the large hard-to-change monolith into a focused microservices cloud-native architecture. The monolith keeps much of the state in memory and replicates between the instances, which makes them hard to split and scale. Scaling up can be expensive and scaling out requires replicating the state and the entire application, rather than the parts that need to be replicated.In comparison to microservices, which provide separation of the logic from the state, the separation enables the application to be broken apart into a number of smaller more manageable units, making them easier to scale. Therefore, a microservices environment consists of multiple services communicating with each other. All the communication between services is initiated and carried out with network calls, and services exposed via application programming interfaces (APIs). Each service comes with its own purpose that serves a unique business value.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Securing microservice environments in a hostile world

At the present time, there is a remarkable trend for application modularization that splits the large hard-to-change monolith into a focused microservices cloud-native architecture. The monolith keeps much of the state in memory and replicates between the instances, which makes them hard to split and scale. Scaling up can be expensive and scaling out requires replicating the state and the entire application, rather than the parts that need to be replicated.In comparison to microservices, which provide separation of the logic from the state, the separation enables the application to be broken apart into a number of smaller more manageable units, making them easier to scale. Therefore, a microservices environment consists of multiple services communicating with each other. All the communication between services is initiated and carried out with network calls, and services exposed via application programming interfaces (APIs). Each service comes with its own purpose that serves a unique business value.To read this article in full, please click here

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