Research: Are We There Yet? RPKI Deployment Considered

The Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) system is designed to prevent hijacking of routes at their origin AS. If you don’t know how this system works (and it is likely you don’t, because there are only a few deployments in the world), you can review the way the system works by reading through this post here on rule11.tech.

Gilad, Yossi & Cohen, Avichai & Herzberg, Amir & Schapira, Michael & Shulman, Haya. (2017). Are We There Yet? On RPKI’s Deployment and Security. 10.14722/ndss.2017.23123.

The paper under review today examines how widely Route Origin Validation (ROV) based on the RPKI system has been deployed. The authors began by determining which Autonomous Systems (AS’) are definitely not deploying route origin validation. They did this by comparing the routes in the global RPKI database, which is synchronized among all the AS’ deploying the RPKI, to the routes in the global Default Free Zone (DFZ), as seen from 44 different route servers located throughout the world. In comparing these two, they found a set of routes which the RPKI system indicated should be originated from one AS, but were actually being originated from another AS in the default free zone.

Continue reading

Finally, a smart way for insurers to leverage IoT in smart homes

Like many consumers, I tend to be automatically suspicious of insurance companies’ plans to track my behavior. And like many tech journalists, I’m also skeptical of clever new smart home automation schemes. But painful personal experience has me all excited about a new pilot program involving Travelers insurance and Notion smart home sensors.According to a post in Coverager: “Travelers has tapped Notion, the home awareness solution and smart home sensor, to offer smart home monitoring systems to Travelers customers in California. Travelers is working with Notion to provide data-driven insights to customers through Notion’s home monitoring system in order to prevent and mitigate threats such as water leaks, fire damage, and thefts.To read this article in full, please click here

What do you believe now that you didn’t five years ago?

 

 

Decentralized systems will continue to lose to centralized systems until there's a driver requiring decentralization to deliver a clearly superior consumer experience. Unfortunately, that may not happen for quite some time.

I say unfortunately because ten years ago, even five years ago, I still believed decentralization would win. Why? For all the idealistic technical reasons I laid out long ago in Building Super Scalable Systems: Blade Runner Meets Autonomic Computing In The Ambient Cloud.

While the internet and the web are inherently decentralized, mainstream applications built on top do not have to be. Typically, applications today—Facebook, Salesforce, Google, Spotify, etc.—are all centralized.

That wasn't always the case. In the early days of the internet the internet was protocol driven, decentralized, and often distributed—FTP (1971), Telnet (<1973), FINGER (1971/1977),  TCP/IP (1974), UUCP (late 1970s) NNTP (1986), DNS (1983), SMTP (1982), IRC(1988), HTTP(1990), Tor (mid-1990s), Napster(1999), and XMPP(1999).

We do have new decentalized services: Bitcoin(2009), Minecraft(2009), Ethereum(2104), IPFS(2015), Mastadon(2016), and PeerTube(2018). We're still waiting on Pied Piper to deliver the decentralized internet. 

On an evolutionary timeline decentralized systems are neanderthals; centralized systems are the humans. Neanderthals came first. Humans may have interbred with neanderthals, humans may have even killed off the neanderthals, but Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: US Gov’t Wants More Encryption – For Itself

Encryption for us, not for you: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is researching ways to improve mobile encryption for federal users, even as the FBI continues to fight against encrypted data on the smartphones of ordinary users. FifthDomain has a story on the DHS effort.

Safety labels for the IoT: The Internet of things needs food safety-style labels detailing the safety and privacy controls on IoT devices, suggests a story at Motherboard.

Consumer Reports and other groups have begun working on a new open source standard intended to help make Internet-connected hardware safer, the story says.

Let’s Encrypt gains support: Let’s Encrypt, the Internet Society-supported secure certificate authority, has picked up endorsements from major root programs like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Mozilla, Oracle, and Blackberry, Packt Hub reports. The zero-cost service allows website operators to pick up SSL certificates for free.

That’s a lot of AI: Intel sold $1 billion worth of Artificial Intelligence chips in 2017, Reuters reports. That’s even a conservative estimate, Intel says. Prepare now for the smart robot takeover!

Hired by AI: Meanwhile, AI is coming to the hiring process, Bloomberg reports, and that may not be such a bad thing. AI may actually be Continue reading

Apcela optimizes Office 365 performance, improving user productivity

More than 120 million Microsoft Office accounts have moved from on-premises to the cloud since the launch of Microsoft Office 365. Many of those accounts belong to users in large enterprises that weren’t fully prepared for the transition. The fact is as many as 30 to 40 percent of enterprises struggle with some level of application performance as they make the shift to cloud.Some of the signs of poor performance (and the source of users’ frustration) include Outlook responding slowly when the user tries to open messages, VoIP calls over Skype for Business having rough spots, and documents being slow to open, close and save in Word. Performance problems in the Office applications manifest in many other ways, as well.To read this article in full, please click here

Apcela optimizes Office 365 performance, improving user productivity

More than 120 million Microsoft Office accounts have moved from on-premises to the cloud since the launch of Microsoft Office 365. Many of those accounts belong to users in large enterprises that weren’t fully prepared for the transition. The fact is as many as 30 to 40 percent of enterprises struggle with some level of application performance as they make the shift to cloud.Some of the signs of poor performance (and the source of users’ frustration) include Outlook responding slowly when the user tries to open messages, VoIP calls over Skype for Business having rough spots, and documents being slow to open, close and save in Word. Performance problems in the Office applications manifest in many other ways, as well.To read this article in full, please click here

How to display data in a human-friendly way on Linux

Not everyone thinks in binary or wants to mentally insert commas into large numbers to come to grips with the sizes of their files. So, it's not surprising that Linux commands have evolved over several decades to incorporate more human-friendly ways of displaying information to its users. In today’s post, we look at some of the options provided by various commands that make digesting data just a little easier.Why not default to friendly? If you’re wondering why human-friendliness isn’t the default –- we humans are, after all, the default users of computers — you might be asking yourself, “Why do we have to go out of our way to get command responses that will make sense to everyone?” The answer is primarily that changing the default output of commands would likely interfere with numerous other processes that were built to expect the default responses. Other tools, as well as scripts, that have been developed over the decades might break in some very ugly ways if they were suddenly fed output in a very different format than what they were built to expect.To read this article in full, please click here

Displaying data in a human-friendly way on Linux

Not everyone thinks in binary or wants to mentally insert commas into large numbers to come to grips with the sizes of their files. So it's not surprising that Linux commands have evolved over several decades to incorporate more human-friendly ways of displaying information to its users. In today’s post, we’re going to look at some of the options provided by various commands that make digesting data just a little easier.Why not default to friendly? If you’re wondering why human-friendliness isn’t the default –- we humans are, after all, the default users of computers -- you might be asking yourself “Why do we have to go out of our way to get command responses that will make sense to everyone?” The answer is primarily that changing the default output of commands would likely interfere with numerous other processes that were built to expect the default responses. Other tools as well as scripts that have been developed over the decades might break in some very ugly ways if they were suddenly fed output in a very different format than what they were built to expect. It’s probably also true that some of us might prefer to see all of Continue reading

Delayed impact of fair machine learning

Delayed impact of fair machine learning Liu et al., ICML’18

“Delayed impact of fair machine learning” won a best paper award at ICML this year. It’s not an easy read (at least it wasn’t for me), but fortunately it’s possible to appreciate the main results without following all of the proof details. The central question is how to ensure fair treatment across demographic groups in a population when using a score-based machine learning model to decide who gets an opportunity (e.g. is offered a loan) and who doesn’t. Most recently we looked at the equal opportunity and equalized odds models.

The underlying assumption of course for studied fairness models is that the fairness criteria promote the long-term well-being of those groups they aim to protect. The big result in this paper is that you can easily up end ‘killing them with kindness’ instead. The potential for this to happen exists when there is a feedback loop in place in the overall system. By overall system here, I mean the human system of which the machine learning model is just a small part. Using the loan/no-loan decision that is a popular study vehicle in fairness papers, we need to Continue reading

Traceroute through Firepower Threat Defense

Nearly eight years ago, I wrote an article about configuring the ASA to permit Traceroute and how to make the device show up in the output. That article is still relevant and gets quite a few hits every day. I wanted to put together a similar How-To article for those using Firepower Threat Defense.

This article examines the configuration required to allow proper traceroute functionality in an FTD environment. The examples shown here leverage Firepower Management Center to manage Firepower Threat Defense. As with any configuration, please assess the security impact and applicability to your environment before implementing.

Before we get started, it is important to understand that there are two basic types of Traceroute implementations. I am using OSX for testing and it defaults to using UDP packets for the test. However, I can also test with ICMP using the -I option. I am already permitting all outbound traffic, so this is not a problem of allowing the UDP or ICMP toward the destination.

Both types of traceroute depend on sending packets with an incrementing TTL field. This is the field that each router decreases as the packet is forwarded. Any router decreasing this to zero should drop the Continue reading

1 … 1,455 1,456 1,457 1,458 1,459 … 3,794