The Athenian Project: Helping Protect Elections

From cyberattacks on election infrastructure, to attempted hacking of voting machines, to attacks on campaign websites, the last few years have brought us unprecedented attempts to use online vulnerabilities to affect elections both in the United States and abroad. In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security reported that individuals tried to hack voter registration files or public election sites in 21 states prior to the 2016 elections. In Europe, hackers targeted not only the campaign of Emmanuel Macron in France, but government election infrastructure in the Czech Republic and Montenegro.

Cyber attack is only one of the many online challenges facing election officials. Unpredictable website traffic patterns are another. Voter registration websites see a flood of legitimate traffic as registration deadlines approach. Election websites must integrate reported results and stay online notwithstanding notoriously hard-to-model election day loads.

We at Cloudflare have seen many election-related cyber challenges firsthand. In the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Cloudflare protected most of the major presidential campaign websites from cyberattack, including the Trump/Pence campaign website, the website for the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, and websites for 14 of the 15 leading candidates from the two major parties. We have also protected election Continue reading

The Athenian Project: Helping Protect Elections

From cyberattacks on election infrastructure, to attempted hacking of voting machines, to attacks on campaign websites, the last few years have brought us unprecedented attempts to use online vulnerabilities to affect elections both in the United States and abroad. In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security reported that individuals tried to hack voter registration files or public election sites in 21 states prior to the 2016 elections. In Europe, hackers targeted not only the campaign of Emmanuel Macron in France, but government election infrastructure in the Czech Republic and Montenegro.

Cyber attack is only one of the many online challenges facing election officials. Unpredictable website traffic patterns are another. Voter registration websites see a flood of legitimate traffic as registration deadlines approach. Election websites must integrate reported results and stay online notwithstanding notoriously hard-to-model election day loads.

We at Cloudflare have seen many election-related cyber challenges firsthand. In the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Cloudflare protected most of the major presidential campaign websites from cyberattack, including the Trump/Pence campaign website, the website for the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, and websites for 14 of the 15 leading candidates from the two major parties. We have also protected election Continue reading

Storm control on a QFX VCF

There don’t seem to be many operational commands in Junos to tell you what’s going on with regard to Storm Control.   Here’s all I could find – let me know if you know of more:

In the lab, I configured this storm control profile:

{master:1}
user@VCF> show configuration forwarding-options
storm-control-profiles TAT-StormControl {
     all {
         bandwidth-level 1000;
     }
     action-shutdown;
}

This was then configured on ae2, which is a trunk interface towards the Ixia tester:

{master:1}
user@VCF> show configuration interfaces ae2 unit 0
 family ethernet-switching {
     interface-mode trunk;
     storm-control TAT-StormControl;
 }

Unfortunately there’s no ‘show forwarding-options storm-control’ type command to see what interfaces have storm control configured.   I can’t find any other command that shows this info either.

So I generate 3Mbps of traffic to ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff from my Ixia into the VCF and the port goes disabled immediately according to the logs:

Dec 15 12:57:23 VCF l2ald[3261]: L2ALD_ST_CTL_IN_EFFECT: ae2.0: storm control in effect on the port
Dec 15 12:57:23 VCF l2ald[3261]: L2ALD_ST_CTL_DISABLED: ae2.0: storm control disabled port
Dec 15 12:57:23 VCF l2cpd[1814]: Root bridge in routing-instance 'default' changed from 4096:b0:a8:6e:0a:bd:41 to 32768:dc:38:e1:5f:c4:02
Dec 15 12:57:23 VCF mib2d[3271]: SNMP_TRAP_LINK_DOWN: ifIndex 526, ifAdminStatus up(1), ifOperStatus down(2), ifName ae2

Continue reading

Installing XMind 8 on Fedora 27

XMind is a well-known cross-platform mind mapping application. Installing the latest version of XMind (version 8) on Linux is, unfortunately, more complicated than it should be. In this post, I’ll show how to get XMind 8 running on Fedora 27.

So why is installing XMind more complicated than it should be? For reasons unknown, the makers of XMind stopped using well-known Linux package mechanisms with this version of the software, providing only a ZIP archive to download and extract. (Previous versions at least provided a Debian package.) While the ZIP archive includes a very simplistic “setup script”, the script does nothing more than install a few packages and install some fonts, and was written expressly for Debian-based systems. If you extract the archive and place the files outside of your home directory (as would be typical for installing an application on most desktop Linux distributions), you’ll run into problems with permissions. Finally, the application itself is extraordinarily brittle with regards to file locations and such; it’s easy to break it by simply moving the wrong file.

Through some research and some trial-and-error, I finally arrived at a configuration for XMind 8 on Fedora 27 that satisfies a couple criteria:

1. Continue reading

The Myth of Network Speed

Video: Avaya [now Extreme] Data Center Solutions

I haven’t done an update on what Avaya was doing in the data center space for years, so I asked my good friend Roger Lapuh to do a short presentation on:

• Avaya’s data center switches and their Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) fabric;
• SPB fabric features;
• Interesting use cases enabled by SPB fabric.

The videos are now available to everyone with a valid ipSpace.net account – the easiest way to get it is a trial subscription.

OpenStack SDN – OpenDaylight With BGP VPN

For the last 5 years OpenStack has been the training ground for a lot of emerging DC SDN solutions. OpenStack integration use case was one of the most compelling and easiest to implement thanks to the limited and suboptimal implementation of the native networking stack. Today, in 2017, features like L2 population, local ARP responder, L2 gateway integration, distributed routing and service function chaining have all become available in vanilla OpenStack and don’t require a proprietary SDN controller anymore. Admittedly, some of the features are still not (and may never be) implemented in the most optimal way (e.g. DVR). This is where new opensource SDN controllers, the likes of OVN and Dragonflow, step in to provide scalable, elegant and efficient implementation of these advanced networking features. However one major feature still remains outside of the scope of a lot of these new opensource SDN projects, and that is data centre gateway (DC-GW) integration. Let me start by explain why you would need this feature in the first place.

Optimal forwarding of North-South traffic

OpenStack Neutron and VMware NSX, both being pure software solutions, rely on a special type of node to forward traffic between VMs Continue reading

OpenStack SDN – OpenDaylight With BGP VPN

In this post I’ll demonstrate how to build a simple OpenStack lab with OpenDaylight-managed virtual networking and integrate it with a Cisco IOS-XE data centre gateway using EVPN.

Linux PiCore on Raspberry Pi – First Steps

The blog post contains notes about the installation of piCore Linux on Raspberry Pi 3 computer. The related topic is well known, discussed by many similar posts however the article represents my own copy & paste reference for later usage.

The first generation of Raspberry Pi 1 has been with us since February 2012. Recently in version 3B, the Pi3 is equipped with 1.2 GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor, 1 GB of RAM and it has integrated 2.4 GHz WiFi 802.11n (150 Mbit/s), Bluetooth 4.1 (24 Mbit/s) on Broadcom BCM43438 chip. It also provides the integrated 10/100 Ethernet port. These factors along with the cheap price (~ 35 US), small size (~ 85.60mm x 56mm x 21mm), low weight (~ 45g) and low power consumption (maximum 1.34 A or 6.7 W under stress when peripherals and WiFi are connected) makes this single-board computer ideal candidate for use in the recent Internet of Things (IoT) world.

Raspberry Pi can run several OSs built for ARM architecture such as Windows 10 IoT Core, Raspbian (based on Debian), Ubuntu Mate and many others. The Linux distributions offer either full desktop environment or they are released Continue reading

Peeking into your Linux packages

Do you ever wonder how many thousands of packages are installed on your Linux system? And, yes, I said "thousands." Even a fairly modest Linux system is likely to have well over a thousand packages installed. And there are many ways to get details on what they are.First, to get a quick count of your installed packages on a Debian-based distribution such as Ubuntu, use the command apt list --installed like this:$ apt list --installed | wc -l 2067 This number is actually one too high because the output contains "Listing..." as its first line. This command would be more accurate:$ apt list --installed | grep -v "^Listing" | wc -l 2066 To get some details on what all these packages are, browse the list like this:To read this article in full, please click here

Help Make the Internet Open to All: Join SIG Women!

When we talk about women and technology, we need to talk data. In the United States, a recent report by the National Center for Women and Information Technology highlighted that only 26% of the workforce in the computer field is made up of women. In addition, a survey by Silicon Valley Bank revealed that 68% of startups do not have women on their board. In India, women make up just 30% of the workforce in the technology industry. In many European countries, the wage gap between men and women is present in technological positions. In Latin America, the proportion of women studying in computer careers is low. In addition, shortcomings in Internet access makes it difficult for women of all ages to use the technology in Africa.

Increasing access, skills, and leadership of women and girls in ICT has enormous potential for improving their health and emancipating them through access to information, education and trade opportunities, strengthening not only families and communities, but also national economies and global society as a whole.

In order to speak on a daily basis and to make the problem visible, we considered it necessary to create a Special Interest Group to help change those statistics Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Math Behind Reliabity

So last week I was looking at some things around Reliability and I realized how big the Reliability Engineering field is. Then I thought why not share it with others on what I have learned so far and at the same time with a hope that experts in this field may read this and correct me if there are any mistakes in my understanding. —Diptanshu Singh @ Packet Pushers

Inside the infamous Mirai IoT Botnet: A Retrospective Analysis

This is a guest post by Elie Bursztein who writes about security and anti-abuse research. It was first published on his blog and has been lightly edited.

This post provides a retrospective analysis of Mirai — the infamous Internet-of-Things botnet that took down major websites via massive distributed denial-of-service using hundreds of thousands of compromised Internet-Of-Things devices. This research was conducted by a team of researchers from Cloudflare (Jaime Cochran, Nick Sullivan), Georgia Tech, Google, Akamai, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, and Merit Network and resulted in a paper published at USENIX Security 2017.

At its peak in September 2016, Mirai temporarily crippled several high-profile services such as OVH, Dyn, and Krebs on Security via massive distributed Denial of service attacks (DDoS). OVH reported that these attacks exceeded 1 Tbps—the largest on public record.

What’s remarkable about these record-breaking attacks is they were carried out via small, innocuous Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices like home routers, air-quality monitors, and personal surveillance cameras. At its peak, Mirai infected over 600,000 vulnerable IoT devices, according to our measurements.

This blog post follows the timeline above

• Mirai Genesis: Discusses Mirai’s early days and provides a brief technical overview of Continue reading

Inside the infamous Mirai IoT Botnet: A Retrospective Analysis

This is a guest post by Elie Bursztein who writes about security and anti-abuse research. It was first published on his blog and has been lightly edited.

This post provides a retrospective analysis of Mirai — the infamous Internet-of-Things botnet that took down major websites via massive distributed denial-of-service using hundreds of thousands of compromised Internet-Of-Things devices. This research was conducted by a team of researchers from Cloudflare, Georgia Tech, Google, Akamai, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, and Merit Network and resulted in a paper published at USENIX Security 2017.

At its peak in September 2016, Mirai temporarily crippled several high-profile services such as OVH, Dyn, and Krebs on Security via massive distributed Denial of service attacks (DDoS). OVH reported that these attacks exceeded 1 Tbps—the largest on public record.

What’s remarkable about these record-breaking attacks is they were carried out via small, innocuous Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices like home routers, air-quality monitors, and personal surveillance cameras. At its peak, Mirai infected over 600,000 vulnerable IoT devices, according to our measurements.

This blog post follows the timeline above

• Mirai Genesis: Discusses Mirai’s early days and provides a brief technical overview of how Mirai works and Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Leveraging reconfigurable computing for smarter cybersecurity

The reality for security teams today is that they are facing challenges on multiple fronts. The number of security breaches is increasing, which means the number of security alerts to be examined each day is increasing. The attacks are becoming more sophisticated and multi-dimensional. The number of cybersecurity solutions available continues to grow, which requires time and effort to understand. The amount of data in the network is snowballing, which means the cybersecurity infrastructure needs to be constantly updated to keep up. What’s worse is that all this is happening in the midst of new networking paradigms related to cloud, virtualization and software-defined data centers.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Leveraging reconfigurable computing for smarter cybersecurity

The reality for security teams today is that they are facing challenges on multiple fronts. The number of security breaches is increasing, which means the number of security alerts to be examined each day is increasing. The attacks are becoming more sophisticated and multi-dimensional. The number of cybersecurity solutions available continues to grow, which requires time and effort to understand. The amount of data in the network is snowballing, which means the cybersecurity infrastructure needs to be constantly updated to keep up. What’s worse is that all this is happening in the midst of new networking paradigms related to cloud, virtualization and software-defined data centers.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Leveraging reconfigurable computing for smarter cybersecurity

The reality for security teams today is that they are facing challenges on multiple fronts. The number of security breaches is increasing, which means the number of security alerts to be examined each day is increasing. The attacks are becoming more sophisticated and multi-dimensional. The number of cybersecurity solutions available continues to grow, which requires time and effort to understand. The amount of data in the network is snowballing, which means the cybersecurity infrastructure needs to be constantly updated to keep up. What’s worse is that all this is happening in the midst of new networking paradigms related to cloud, virtualization and software-defined data centers.To read this article in full, please click here

Xen Project Pushes Security-Focused Update for Cloud Hypervisor

Reports indicate AWS support could be waning.

ETSI Zero-Touch Group Tackles 5G Network Automation

Service providers say 5G challenges require using NFV, SDN, and MEC.

Enterprises Challenged By The Many Guises Of AI

Artificial intelligence and machine learning, which found solid footing among the hyperscalers and is now expanding into the HPC community, are at the top of the list of new technologies that enterprises want to embrace for all kinds of reasons. But it all boils down to the same problem: Sorting through the increasing amounts of data coming into their environments and finding patterns that will help them to run their businesses more efficiently, to make better businesses decisions, and ultimately to make more money.

Enterprises are increasingly experimenting with the various frameworks and tools that are on the market …

Enterprises Challenged By The Many Guises Of AI was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.