Wireless ESSID as ROT13 Ciphertext

Recently, I have scanned nearby wireless networks with airodump. I have discovered five networks transmitting on channel 3. MAC addresses of access points (BSSIDs) transmitting on channel 3 differ only in last two hexa digits and a signal level (PWR) reported by my WiFi card is almost same for all BSSIDs.

$ sudo airodump-ng wlp3s0

Picture 1 - Wireless Networks of Caffe Geo Guru

The following three ESSIDs have caught my attention.

1) Heslo do siete caffe.geo.guru
2) zistis rozlustenim sifry
3) qnw fv qboer cvib

In fact, the ESSIDs represent a cryptography challenge created for customers of caffe.geo.guru. Once the challenge is successfully solved a customer gains a password for connection to the wireless network with ESSID caffe.geo.guru.

Note: The first two ESSID are written in Slovak. Their English version is below.

1) Password to network caffe.geo.guru
2) can be gained by decoding words
3) qnw fv qboer cvib

The third ESSID represents an encoded password. Obviously, letters are substituted in ciphertext which let us to the assumption that ROT cipher is used. Using ROT13 cipher on the encoded text 'qnw fv qboer cvib' gives us a required plain-text password Continue reading

Wireless ESSID as ROT13 Ciphertext

Recently, I have scanned nearby wireless networks with airodump. I have discovered five networks transmitting on channel 3. MAC addresses of access points (BSSIDs) transmitting on channel 3 differ only in last two hexa digits and a signal level (PWR) reported by my WiFi card is almost same for all BSSIDs.

$ sudo airodump-ng wlp3s0

Picture 1 - Wireless Networks of Caffe Geo Guru

The following three ESSIDs have caught my attention.

1) Heslo do siete caffe.geo.guru
2) zistis rozlustenim sifry
3) qnw fv qboer cvib

In fact, the ESSIDs represent a cryptography challenge created for customers of caffe.geo.guru. Once the challenge is successfully solved a customer gains a password for connection to the wireless network with ESSID caffe.geo.guru.

Note: The first two ESSID are written in Slovak. Their English version is below.

1) Password to network caffe.geo.guru
2) can be gained by decoding words
3) qnw fv qboer cvib

The third ESSID represents an encoded password. Obviously, letters are substituted in ciphertext which let us to the assumption that ROT cipher is used. Using ROT13 cipher on the encoded text 'qnw fv qboer cvib' gives us a required plain-text password Continue reading

Deconfusing the Static Route

Configuring a static route is just like installing an entry directly in the routing table (or the RIB).

I have been told this many times in my work as a network engineer by operations people, coders, designers, and many other folks. The problem is that it is, in some routing table implementations, too true. To understand, it is best to take a short tour through how a typical RIB interacts with a routing protocol. Assume BGP, or IS-IS, learns about a new route that needs to be installed in the RIB:

  • The RIB into which the route needs to be installed is somehow determined. This might be through some sort of special tagging, or perhaps each routing process has a separate RIB into which it is installing routes, etc.. In any case, the routing process must determine which RIB the route should be installed in.
  • Look the next hop up in the RIB, to determine if it is reachable. A route cannot be installed if there is no next hop through which to forward the traffic towards the described destination.
  • Call the RIB interface to install the route.

The last step results in one of two possible reactions. The first Continue reading

Digital Empowerment of Women in South Asia

The Internet Society Pakistan Islamabad Chapter (PK IBD) organised a webinar on “Digital Empowerment of Women in South Asia” on 15 March, 2018. ISOC Chapter leaders, members, and staff participated in the webinar where the regional and global women-centric initiatives were shared by the speakers.

The undersigned welcomed the audience on behalf of the Internet Society Pakistan Islamabad Chapter followed by a round of introductions. Joyce Dogniez, the Internet Society’s Senior Director, Global Community Engagement, shared the importance and relevance of the UN-EQUALS partnership which is a unique collaboration between state and non-state actors to bridge the digital gender divide. Joyce shared that the Internet Society is an important part of this partnership that primarily emphasizes improving ICT access, imparting digital skills, and promoting leadership of women. Internet and digital literacy leads to economic empowerment of women that can have a profound community impact.

The next session featured updates from the Chapter Leaders of South Asia on the various initiatives being undertaken on the country and Chapter level. Sagarika Wickramasekera from the ISOC Sri Lanka Chapter informed about the initiatives of the Chapter including WomenIGF, IT trainings for girls at school level, Internet learning programmes for women entrepreneurship, etc. Sidra Jalil from Continue reading

Lockin In Enterprise IT – Video

We all know that ‘lock in’ is inevitable. You make a choice and then you live with the consequences of what you have bought. However, I see a number of area where vendors are actively promoting lockin to capture unearned profits and control their partners. These dark patterns are not always obvious and I wanted […]

Network Break 178: Cisco Disaggregates, ATT Bets Big On Whitebox

Take a Network Break! Cisco announced that it would allow third-party OSs to run on Nexus 9200 and 9300 switches, and let customers run NX-OS on other hardware. The company is also making its IOS-XR router OS available for “curated” third-party hardware.

AT&T announces a plan to deploy 60,000 whitebox routers as part of its 5G rollout, and its dNOS open network OS moves to the Linux Foundation. Juniper’s OpenContrail also joins the Linux Foundation and gets renamed Tungsten Fabric.

The P4 network programming language becomes an official project of the Open Networking Foundation, HPE buys Cape Networks for WLAN performance monitoring, Microsoft reorganizes the company, and Arista announces new 25 and 100GbE switches.

Get links with more details to all these stories after our sponsor message.

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Show Links:

An Architectural Approach to Flexible Consumption for Service Providers with IOS XR – Cisco

Enabling IOS-XR on Third-Party Network Hardware Continue reading

How ipdata serves 25M API calls from 10 infinitely scalable global endpoints for $150 a month

This is a guest post by Jonathan Kosgei, founder of ipdata, an IP Geolocation API. 

I woke up on Black Friday last year to a barrage of emails from users reporting 503 errors from the ipdata API.

Our users typically call our API on each page request on their websites to geolocate their users and localize their content. So this particular failure was directly impacting our users’ websites on the biggest sales day of the year. 

I only lost one user that day but I came close to losing many more.

This sequence of events and their inexplicable nature — cpu, mem and i/o were nowhere near capacity. As well as concerns on how well (if at all) we would scale, given our outage, were a big wake up call to rethink our existing infrastructure.

Our Tech stack at the time

BrandPost: Ciena Network Insight – Podcast Series

Stay informed with Ciena's Network Insights podcast each month and meet the innovators and thinkers who are building the infrastructure for our future. We'll be looking at system overload of our global networks due to increasing IoT traffic, emerging 4K and 8K video, and VR applications. To keep up and avoid hitting critical mass, networks have to work smarter, not harder.Tune into our Network Insights podcast each month for an in-depth discussion on the different ways these bandwidth killers force networks to push the boundaries of programmability and intelligence, and meet the innovators and thinkers who are building the infrastructure for our future.To read this article in full, please click here

Flow smoothing

The sFlow-RT real-time analytics engine includes statistical smoothing. The chart above illustrates the effect of different levels of smoothing when analyzing real-time sFlow telemetry.

The traffic generator in this example creates an alternating pattern: 1.25Mbytes/second for 30 seconds followed by a pause of 30 seconds. Smoothing time constants between 1 second and 500 seconds have been applied to generate the family of charts. The blue line is the result of 1 second smoothing and closely tracks the traffic pattern. At the other extreme, the dark red line is the result of 500 second smoothing, showing a constant 625Kbytes/second (the average of the waveform).

There is a tradeoff between responsiveness and variability (noise) when selecting the level of smoothing. Selecting a suitable smoothing level depends on the flow analytics application.

Low smoothing values are appropriate when fast response is required, for example:
Higher smoothing values are appropriate when less variability is desirable, for example:

Generating the chart

The results described in this article are easily reproduced using the testbed Continue reading

Deadline TODAY (23:59 UTC) to submit comments to ICANN on 2018 DNSSEC Root KSK Rollover Plan

Do you believe ICANN should go ahead with the plan to roll the Root Key Signing Key (KSK) on 11 October 2018? If so (or if not), the deadline for public comment is TODAY, 2 April 2018, at 23:59 UTC. That’s about 9.5 hours from the time I’m publishing this post.

My colleague Kevin Meynell provided more info about this public comment process when it began in March. At the IETF 101 meeting in London, I spoke with ICANN staff who again stated that they would like to hear from many voices about whether they should go ahead with the Root KSK Rollover on 11 October 2018. It’s very simple to send in comments:

Learn how to submit your comments to ICANN

You can see the current list of comments at: https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/comments-ksk-rollover-restart-01feb18/2018q1/thread.html (All comments are public.)

I would encourage anyone interested to submit comments (even if they are simply “I support the plan.”).

And if you have want more information about how to get started with using DNSSEC, please see our Deploy360 Start page to begin.

Image credit: Bryce Barker on Unsplash

The post Deadline TODAY (23:59 UTC) to submit comments to ICANN Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: IT Pros Know IoT Security Needs Work, But They Aren’t There Yet

What IoT security problem? Most IT professionals realize the Internet of things poses some security risks, but less than a third of them actively monitor for third-party IoT security problems, according to a survey detailed at ZDNet. More than a third of those surveyed said that nobody in their organization is responsible for reviewing the risk-management policies of their IoT vendors.

Some security risks, only faster: Meanwhile, the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security is warning organizations that 5G mobile service may bring the same security risks as earlier mobile standards have. Known flaws in SS7 and Diameter, the signaling protocols used in 2G, 3G, and 4G, could end up in 5G, and allow traffic to be eavesdropped or spoofed, reports ARN.

Community broadband for net neutrality: The American Civil Liberties Union is urging U.S. cities to build their own broadband networks as a way to protect net neutrality principles, now that the Federal Communications Commission has repealed its related regulations. The Hill has a story. Many small U.S. cities are already building their own, in an effort to provide faster or cheaper service than commercial providers, Governing Magazine says.

Fake news in the news: Malaysia Continue reading

The Future is Containerized

Last week I announced my departure from VMware, and my intention to step away from VMware’s products and platforms to focus on a new technology area moving forward. Today marks the “official” start of a journey that’s been building for a couple years, a journey that will take me into a future that’s containerized. That journey starts in Seattle, Washington.

Why Seattle, Washington? Because that’s where Heptio is based, and because today I am joining Heptio as a senior member of the field engineering team to help drive the adoption of Kubernetes across the industry. Only a couple of folks guessed that I was headed to Heptio. If you were one of those folks, you guessed correctly!

Two questions are probably rolling around in your head right now:

  1. Why Kubernetes?
  2. Why Heptio?

Good questions!

It’s clear to me that containers will have a significant impact on how we as IT professionals will develop, deploy, upgrade, and manage applications. It’s also clear to me that when it comes to orchestrating containers, Kubernetes is the clear leader. So, if I accept that containers are going to be a significant part of IT moving forward, then it logically follows that Kubernetes is Continue reading

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