Cool Hacks Spotlight: DART

Docker container platforms  are being used to support mission-critical efforts all over the world. The Planetary Defense Coordination Office out of NASA is using Docker’s platform to support a critical mission that could potentially affect everyone on the planet! The office is responsible for tracking near-earth asteroids, characterizing them and determining how to deflect them if one were to find its way to earth. 

DART, led by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory by way of NASA, is the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. The team has chosen a potentially hazardous asteroid to hit in order to measure the impact and determine how effective this type of mission would be.

Developing the software for this mission is no easy feat, because space is hard! The team has one shot to make this mission work, there’s no rebooting in space. Space physics constraints lead to very low bandwidth, and low density memory due to the turbulent effects of radiation. So what did the software team want to solve for using Docker? Hardware scarcity. The development systems used in this project are very expensive ($300K), so not every developer is going to get their own system. This led to a time constraint, Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Protecting iOS against the aLTEr attacks

Researchers from Ruhr-Universität Bochum & New York University Abu Dhabi have uncovered a new attack against devices using the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) network protocol. LTE, which is a form of 4G, is a mobile communications standard used by billions of devices and the largest cellular providers around the world.In other words, the attack can be used against you.The research team has named the attack “aLTEr” and it allows the attacker to intercept communications using a man-in-the-middle technique and redirect the victim to malicious websites using DNS spoofing.To read this article in full, please click here

The aftermath of the Gentoo GitHub hack

Gentoo GitHub hack: What happened? Late last month (June 28), the Gentoo GitHub repository was attacked after someone gained control of an admin account. All access to the repositories was soon removed from Gentoo developers. Repository and page content were altered. But within 10 minutes of the attacker gaining access, someone noticed something was going on, 7 minutes later a report was sent, and within 70 minutes the attack was over. Legitimate Gentoo developers were shut out for 5 days while the dust settled and repairs and analysis were completed.The attackers also attempted to add "rm -rf" commands to some repositories to cause user data to be recursively removed. As it turns out, this code was unlikely to be run because of technical precautions that were in place, but this wouldn't have been obvious to the attacker.To read this article in full, please click here

The aftermath of the Gentoo GitHub hack

Gentoo GitHub hack: What happened? Late last month (June 28), the Gentoo GitHub repository was attacked after someone gained control of an admin account. All access to the repositories was soon removed from Gentoo developers. Repository and page content were altered. But within 10 minutes of the attacker gaining access, someone noticed something was going on, 7 minutes later a report was sent, and within 70 minutes the attack was over. Legitimate Gentoo developers were shut out for 5 days while the dust settled and repairs and analysis were completed.The attackers also attempted to add "rm -rf" commands to some repositories to cause user data to be recursively removed. As it turns out, this code was unlikely to be run because of technical precautions that were in place, but this wouldn't have been obvious to the attacker.To read this article in full, please click here

Rough Guide to IETF 102: Internet Infrastructure Resilience

As usual, in this post I’ll focus on important work the IETF is doing that helps improve the security and resilience of the Internet infrastructure.

At IETF 102 there are a lot of new ideas being brought to the community in the form of Internet Drafts aimed at improving the security and resilience of the Internet infrastructure, and I’d like to introduce some of them to you. But keep in mind – an Internet Draft does not indicate IETF endorsement, is not a standard, and may not result in any further work at the IETF.

So, let us look at what is happening in the domain of BGP, the routing protocol that connects the Internet.

Route leaks

There has been slow progress in the work on mitigating route leaks in the IDR Working Group (WG). One of the reasons for the slowness was that the group was considering two proposals addressing the route leak problem and both are IDR WG documents:  “Methods for Detection and Mitigation of BGP Route Leaks”, and “Route Leak Prevention using Roles in Update and Open Messages”. Plus, there is a third submission “Route Leak Detection and Filtering using Roles Continue reading

BrandPost: CTO Notes from the Road: 3 take-aways from customers in 6 countries across Asia Pacific

Ciena Anup Changaroth, of Ciena’s CTO Office in APAC, highlights a few insights from Ciena’s recent six-country roadshow he participated in across the Asia-Pacific region. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been on the road supporting our annual Ciena Drive Roadshows in Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and finishing up with Hong Kong. We had the opportunity to share Ciena’s Adaptive Network vision with both customers and partners, as well as an opportunity to discuss with them their top priorities, challenges and investment plans.To read this article in full, please click here

Redirecting DNS Requests to Umbrella with ASA

As networks begin leveraging intelligent DNS products, there is often a need to do some magic at the Internet edge to redirect to the target provider. Some products actually have this capability embedded. Even though the ASA doesn’t specifically have a defined configuration to do this, we can achieve the same outcome with a few simple NAT rules.

An initial thought would be to build a NAT policy as follows

//define the objects
object network obj_any
 subnet 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0
object network Umbrella1
 host 208.67.220.220
object network Umbrella2
 host 208.67.222.222
object service UDP-53
 service udp destination eq domain

//define the nat rules
nat (any,outside) source dynamic any interface destination static obj_any Umbrella1 service UDP-53 UDP-53
nat (any,outside) source dynamic any interface destination static obj_any Umbrella2 service UDP-53 UDP-53

This will sort of work. However, there are two words of caution I would share with this approach. First, DNS sometimes leverages TCP. Second, the last NAT rule will never be used. In this case, even requests to 208.67.222.222 would match the first rule and be re-written to the destination 208.67.220.220.

My recommendation would be Continue reading

Redirecting DNS Requests to Umbrella with ASA

As networks begin leveraging intelligent DNS products, there is often a need to do some magic at the Internet edge to redirect to the target provider. Some products actually have this capability embedded. Even though the ASA doesn’t specifically have a defined configuration to do this, we can achieve the same outcome with a few simple NAT rules.

An initial thought would be to build a NAT policy as follows

//define the objects
object network obj_any
 subnet 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0
object network Umbrella1
 host 208.67.220.220
object network Umbrella2
 host 208.67.222.222
object service UDP-53
 service udp destination eq domain

//define the nat rules
nat (any,outside) source dynamic any interface destination static obj_any Umbrella1 service UDP-53 UDP-53
nat (any,outside) source dynamic any interface destination static obj_any Umbrella2 service UDP-53 UDP-53

This will sort of work. However, there are two words of caution I would share with this approach. First, DNS sometimes leverages TCP. Second, the last NAT rule will never be used. In this case, even requests to 208.67.222.222 would match the first rule and be re-written to the destination 208.67.220.220.

My recommendation would be Continue reading

Comments on Vendor Optics – Listen Here

I recently listened to Packet Pushers show 395 recently. It is a great discussion on optical networking. One thing I wanted to make everyone aware of was a series of comments on the varying quality of optics and some justification around the premium prices often found on vendor branded optics. While the entire episode is worth a listen, the discussion around vendor optics begins at about 35:20 into the recording.

I work for a vendor and it is doubtful that people would view my opinion as unbiased. I encourage everyone to take a listen below and form their own opinions.

If you are a tech guy or girl, the Packet Pushers Podcast is a perfect addition to the podcatcher.
.

Disclaimer: This article includes the independent thoughts, opinions, commentary or technical detail of Paul Stewart. This may or may does not reflect the position of past, present or future employers.

 

Readers of this article may also enjoy:

  1. Citizens of Tech 001 – Knuckle Cracking Felt Animals
  2. New Podcast for the Podcatcher – The Network Collective
  3. My Podcasts
  4. Risky Business #349 <-- Wow, a LOT Happened in 2014
  5. Back In The Future

Comments on Vendor Optics – Listen Here

I recently listened to Packet Pushers show 395 recently. It is a great discussion on optical networking. One thing I wanted to make everyone aware of was a series of comments on the varying quality of optics and some justification around the premium prices often found on vendor branded optics. While the entire episode is worth a listen, the discussion around vendor optics begins at about 35:20 into the recording.

I work for a vendor and it is doubtful that people would view my opinion as unbiased. I encourage everyone to take a listen below and form their own opinions.

If you are a tech guy or girl, the Packet Pushers Podcast is a perfect addition to the podcatcher.
.

Disclaimer: This article includes the independent thoughts, opinions, commentary or technical detail of Paul Stewart. This may or may does not reflect the position of past, present or future employers.

 

Readers of this article may also enjoy:

  1. Citizens of Tech 001 – Knuckle Cracking Felt Animals
  2. New Podcast for the Podcatcher – The Network Collective
  3. My Podcasts
  4. Risky Business #349 <-- Wow, a LOT Happened in 2014
  5. Back In The Future

Most Enterprise of Things initiatives are a waste of money

The Internet of Things (IoT) has captured much attention recently as more devices like wearables, AR/VR headsets and sensor-based products make their way to market. But off-the-shelf consumer-oriented devices are not always what enterprises need. Rather, most companies need a more specialized approach than just deploying things all over the place.As a result, the more specialized Enterprise of Things (EoT) is becoming a significant part of nearly all companies' plans for the next three to five years. Indeed, we expect EoT to become a top 3 item on most organizations' strategic initiatives in the coming two to three years. EoT will partner with ongoing enterprise cloud and security initiatives as organizations look to transform how they do business and run more efficient and user-responsive operations. But research shows that for many companies currently deploying or planning deployments of EoT, it’s a waste of money.To read this article in full, please click here

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