Announcing NDSS 2019 & the Call for Papers

It may seem far away, but it’s time to begin planning for the 26th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium. NDSS 2019 will once again be held in sunny San Diego at the lovely Catamaran Spa and Resort from 24-27 February 2019.

This annual security symposium is a premiere venue for fostering information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

NDSS 2019 will have a new General Chair, Dr. Trent Jaeger of Pennsylvania State University. In addition, the Program Committee for NDSS 2019 is being chaired by Dr. Alina Opera of Northeastern University and Dr. Dongyan Xu of Purdue University. Additional positions will be announced in the coming weeks.

Most importantly for all you researchers out there, the NDSS 2019 Call for Papers has been released. As in years past, the focus of the symposium will be the many aspects of security and privacy including the security of emerging Continue reading

Finding Value in Cisco Live 2018

The world famous Cisco Live Sign picture, 2018 edition

Another Cisco Live has come and gone. Overall it was a fun time for many. Catching up with friends. Meeting people for the first time. Enjoying the balmy Orlando weather. It was a chance to relive some great times for every one. But does Cisco Live 2018 dictate how the future of the event will go?

Packing The Schedule

Did you get a chance to attend any of the social events at Cisco Live? There were a ton. There were Tweetups and meet ups and special sessions galore. There was every opportunity to visit a lounge or area dedicated to social media presence, Boomerang videos, goofy pictures, or global outreach. Every twenty feet had something for you to do or some way for you to make an impact.

In fact, if you went to all of these things you probably didn’t have time for much else. Definitely not time for the four or five keynote addresses. Or a certification test. Or the classes and sessions. In fact, if you tried to do everything there was to do at Cisco Live, you’d probably not sleep the whole week. There’s almost as much Continue reading

Kernel of Truth episode 02 — Day 2 operations

Network monitoring, “Wonderwall” by Oasis, virtual test environments, Wu-Tang Clan (Cumulus Rules Everything Around Me!), validating configurations and cursed email chains. What do all of these things have in common? They’re all topics in Kernel of Truth’s second episode! Now, if you want to know HOW all of these seemingly random talking points fit together, you’ll have to listen for yourself, but the main focus of this discussion is Day 2 operations. Specifically, we get into important topics like:

  • The importance of accurate virtual environments
  • Managing configuration changes
  • How to handle updating configs and removing vulnerabilities
  • Why screenshots of Word documents make network operators die inside
  • And more!

Our guest panel consists of two networking ops experts from Cumulus Networks: Senior Consulting Engineer Rama Darbha (also known as “Tough Tiger Fist” according to the Wu-Tang name generator), who you’ll remember from our previous episode on network automation, and Technical Marketing Engineer Pete Lumbis (aka “Master Block Warrior”). These industry pros joined me (“Ungrateful Ambassador”) to provide first-hand experience and insight into why Day 2 operations deserve just as much attention as architectural design.

On another note, we’ve got some great news — Continue reading

Building a serverless Slack bot using Cloudflare Workers

Building a serverless Slack bot using Cloudflare Workers

Our Workers platform can be used for a ton of useful purposes: for A/B (multivariate) testing, storage bucket authentication, coalescing responses from multiple APIs, and more. But Workers can also be put to use beyond "HTTP middleware": a Worker can effectively be a web application in its own right. Given the rise of 'chatbots', we can also build a Slack app using Cloudflare Workers, with no servers required (well, at least not yours!).

Building a serverless Slack bot using Cloudflare Workers

What are we Building?

We're going to build a Slack bot (as an external webhook) for fetching the latest stock prices.

This Worker could also be adapted to fetch open issues from GitHub's API; to discover what movie to watch after work; anything with a REST API you can make query against.

Nevertheless, our "stock prices bot":

  • Uses the Alpha Vantage API to fetch stock prices
  • Caches a map of the top equities to their public identifiers, so you can request /stocks MSFT as a shorthand.
  • Leverages Cloudflare's cache to minimize the need to hit the API on every invocation, whilst still serving recent price data.

Using the cache allows you to improve your bot's response times across all invocations of your Worker. It's also polite Continue reading

Linux control sequence tricks

There are quite a few control sequences available on Linux systems— many I use routinely, and some I've only just recently discovered— and they can be surprisingly useful. In today's post, we're going to run through a series of them and take a look at what they do and how they might be useful.To start, unless you're brand spanking new to the command line, you are undoubtedly familiar with the ctrl-c sequence that is used to terminate a running command. In print, this same sequence might be expressed as ^c or control-c and sometimes the "c" will be capitalized, but the expression always means "hold the control key and press the key specified — with no shift key or hyphen involved.To read this article in full, please click here

Plan now for your migration to Windows Server 2019

With the upcoming release of Windows Server 2019 this fall, it’s time for enterprise IT pros who work in Microsoft shops to start planning their migration to the new operating system.As with any major release, it takes time to get familiar with what’s new and to start getting hands-on experience implementing new features. In this case, the enhancements include improved security and enhanced data-center capabilities.[ Check out AI boosts data-center availability, efficiency. Also learn what hyperconvergence is and whether you’re ready for hyperconverged storage. | For regularly scheduled insights sign up for Network World newsletters. ] So far among those who have been experimenting with the Insider Preview of Windows Server 2019 the most areas commonly deployed first are:To read this article in full, please click here

Plan now for your migration to Windows Server 2019

With the upcoming release of Windows Server 2019 this fall, it’s time for enterprise IT pros who work in Microsoft shops to start planning their migration to the new operating system.As with any major release, it takes time to get familiar with what’s new and to start getting hands-on experience implementing new features. In this case, the enhancements include improved security and enhanced data-center capabilities.[ Check out AI boosts data-center availability, efficiency. Also learn what hyperconvergence is and whether you’re ready for hyperconverged storage. | For regularly scheduled insights sign up for Network World newsletters. ] So far among those who have been experimenting with the Insider Preview of Windows Server 2019 the most areas commonly deployed first are:To read this article in full, please click here

A Quick Intro to the AWS CLI

This post provides a (very) basic introduction to the AWS CLI (command-line interface) tool. It’s not intended to be a deep dive, nor is it intended to serve as a comprehensive reference guide (the AWS CLI docs nicely fill that need). I also assume that you already have a basic understanding of the key AWS concepts and terminology, so I won’t bore you with defining an instance, VPC, subnet, or security group.

For the purposes of this introduction, I’ll structure it around launching an EC2 instance. As it turns out, there’s a fair amount of information you need before you can launch an AWS instance using the AWS CLI. So, let’s look at how you would use the AWS CLI to help get the information you need in order to launch an instance using the AWS CLI. (Tool inception!)

To launch an instance, you need five pieces of information:

  1. The ID of an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
  2. The type of instance you’re going to launch
  3. The name of the SSH keypair you’d like to inject into the instance
  4. The ID of the security group to which this instance should be added
  5. The ID of the subnet on which this Continue reading

Time for a Summer Break

So many things have happened since I wrote “this is what we’re going to do in 2018” blog post. We ran

We also did a ton of webinars:

Read more ...

Automated localization for unreproducible builds

Automated localization for unreproducible builds Ren et al., ICSE’18

Reproducible builds are an important component of integrity in the software supply chain. Attacks against package repositories and build environments may compromise binaries and produce packages with backdoors (see this report for a recent prominent example of compromised packages on DockerHub). If the same source files always lead to the same binary packages, then an infected binary can be much more easily detected. Unfortunately, reproducible builds have not traditionally been the norm. Non-determinism creeping into build processes means that rebuilding an application from the exact same source, even within a secure build environment, can often lead to a different binary.

Due to the significant benefits, many open-source software repositories have initiated their validation processes. These repositories include GNU/Linux distributions such as Debian and Guix, as well as software systems like Bitcoin.

If you have a non-reproducible build, finding out why can be non-trivial. It takes time and a lot of effort to hunt down and eradicate the causes. For example, Debian unstable for AMD64 still had 2,342 packages with non-reproducible builds as of August 2017. (The number today as I’m writing this is 2,826). You can see a stubbornly persistent Continue reading

Another 10 Years Later

The evolutionary path of any technology can often take strange and unanticipated turns and twists. At some points simplicity and minimalism can be replaced by complexity and ornamentation, while at other times a dramatic cut-through exposes the core concepts of the technology and removes layers of superfluous additions. The evolution of the Internet appears to be no exception and contains these same forms of unanticipated turns and twists. In thinking about the technology of the Internet over the last ten years, it appears that it’s been a very mixed story about what’s changed and what’s stayed the same.

SharkFest 2018!! Woot woot! So Excited!

On Saturday I leave North Carolina to head to Sunnyvale, California for…… (insert drumroll here)… SharkFest!  I’m am so pumped and excited!  I have wanted to attend SharkFest since 2009 when I first learned about it!  I’m finally going!  Woot woot!

It is not uncommon that I find myself having to explain what SharkFest is… even to diehard WireShark users and enthusiasts.  So let me take a step back and explain what SharkFest is.

What is SharkFest?

SharkFest™, launched in 2008, is a series of annual educational conferences staged in various parts of the globe and focused on sharing knowledge, experience and best practices among the Wireshark® developer and user communities.

SharkFest attendees hone their skills in the art of packet analysis by attending lecture and lab-based sessions delivered by the most seasoned experts in the industry. Wireshark core code contributors also gather during the conference days to enrich and evolve the tool to maintain its relevance in ensuring the productivity of modern networks.

https://sharkfestus.wireshark.org/about

Teehee.  So basically it is a major WireShark geek fest!!!!  And I am STOKED!  Who wouldn’t be?  Just look at the classes I’ve Continue reading

NSX Cloud Blog Series: Part 1

On the heels of announcing general availability of NSX Cloud on June 5th, we’re pleased to announce that NSX Cloud was selected as Best of Show runners-up in the cloud computing category at Interop Tokyo. The full list of all winners is available here. For those unfamiliar, Interop Tokyo is a major event of over 140,000 attendees, and this award requires an hour presentation including a demo and Q&A to the Interop Committee, so this award came with some scrutiny and we’re proud to have received it.

 

Let’s deep dive a little into what NSX Cloud is all about. As enterprises make the transition to a hybrid cloud model, new challenges inherent to managing this hybrid cloud model arise, including: how to extend enterprise network policies seamlessly to the cloud, how to have complete operational visibility into traffic flows across your hybrid environment, and how to maintain a consistent security policy across private and public clouds. These are key concerns for Network and Security administrators as well as cloud architects. NSX Cloud is designed to address these requirements.

 

NSX Cloud Model

 

NSX Cloud together with NSX Data Center provides a uniform operational model across Public Cloud and on-premises Continue reading

BiB 046: Arista 7170 Multi-function Programmable Network Switches

Ethan Banks attended a technical webinar held by Arista Networks talking about their recently announced 7170 series multi-function programmable network switches. In this webinar, Arista explained what the new 7170 switch line was all about. The central reason this switch line exists is programmability.

The post BiB 046: Arista 7170 Multi-function Programmable Network Switches appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Details Emerge On Post-K Exascale System With First Prototype

Japanese computer maker Fujitsu, which has four different processors under development at the same time aimed at different workloads in the datacenter – five if you count its digital annealer quantum chip – has unveiled some of the details about the future Arm processor, as yet unnamed, that is being created for the Post-K exascale supercomputer at RIKEN, the research and development arm of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). …

Details Emerge On Post-K Exascale System With First Prototype was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

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