How to speed up IoT deployment: Give each device an identity

Most enterprises are in the process of evaluating how the Internet of Things (IoT) will affect their organization, especially how devices targeted at the Enterprise of Things (EoT) will be deployed.Indeed, companies that deploy “things” need to worry about security, manageability, longevity/availability and robustness — unlike consumers who generally don’t concern themselves with such things. I recently discussed what I see as a real lack of focus on IoT security from a device perspective. What I’d like to discuss now is the need make it easier to deploy and manage devices, especially those focused on enterprise deployments. This can be relatively easily accomplished by creating a unique unalterable identity for each device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Turn Your Ansible Playbook into a Bash Command

In one of the previous blog posts I described the playbook I use to collect SSH keys from network devices. As I use it quite often, it became tedious to write ansible-playbook path-to-playbook every time I wanted to run the collection process.

Ansible playbooks are YAML documents, and YAML documents use # to start comments, so I thought “what if I’d use a YAML comment to add shebang and turn my YAML document into a script”

TL&DR: It works. Now for the longer story…

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Discussion about SFP, SFP+, QSFP, QSFP+, XFP and CFP Modules/Connectors

Today I am going to talk about the hardware generally used in many of the devices for the fiber/copper connectivity with the devices in the network.

I will talk about the various kinds of modules which includes the following types

  • SFP
  • SFP+
  • QSFP, QSFP+, QSFP14, QSFP28
  • XFP
  • CFP
Fig 1.1- Sample QSFP+ to SFP+ Connectivity


Lets start with the SFP module discussion, then we will go with the SFP+, QSFP, QSFP+, XFP and then CFP modules. I will talk about the usage, Wavelength, data rate speed and so many factors which describe these modules in details. I hope with this article you will easily understand the various types of modules uses in industries now a days with the capacity and the data rate speed of these different modules.


SFP: SFP stands for small form factor pluggable, With the help of SFP you can extend the switching capability by connecting the fiber/copper cable between two devices. SFP is the way of technology to connect the devices. You can use as a Single fiber, Dual Fiber, DWDM, WDM. It can support maximum of 150 Km. SFP is based on IEEE802.3 and SFF-8472. SFP transceivers are designed to support Continue reading

Linux Networking

Configuring network components in linux can differ from distribution to distribution. I usually find myself searching for the information found here so this is part documentation for me and part blog post for anyone else who cares to read past the introduction. This post covers various...

Sorry, Network Jobs Are Changing

There’s a lot of angst in the networking community about programming, SDN, automation, and what it means for networking careers. Plenty of people will tell you don’t worry about it, focus on the fundamentals, there’s plenty of work, you will be fine.

There is some truth in that. There are still lots of jobs in networking. People with solid skillsets should have no problem finding a good job.

But.

Don’t fool yourself. Things are changing.

I’ve seen some research from Gartner that indicates that organisations have been steadily decreasing their Network Operations teams over the last five years. They have also been reducing their Data Networks spend. (Sadly I don’t have publication rights for this research, so you’ll just have to take my word for it).

This is going to put pressure on networking engineers. Your role will be forced to change, if for no other reason than that you are going to have less budget, and fewer people to do the work.

So you’d better think about what that means for how your role might change.

Do you need to change jobs today? No. You don’t have to outrun the lion’ - but you do want to make Continue reading

Least Privilege Container Orchestration

The Docker platform and the container has become the standard for packaging, deploying, and managing applications. In order to coordinate running containers across multiple nodes in a cluster, a key capability is required: a container orchestrator.

container orchestrator

Orchestrators are responsible for critical clustering and scheduling tasks, such as:

  • Managing container scheduling and resource allocation.
  • Support service discovery and hitless application deploys.
  • Distribute the necessary resources that applications need to run.

Unfortunately, the distributed nature of orchestrators and the ephemeral nature of resources in this environment makes securing orchestrators a challenging task. In this post, we will describe in detail the less-considered—yet vital—aspect of the security model of container orchestrators, and how Docker Enterprise Edition with its built-in orchestration capability, Swarm mode, overcomes these difficulties.

Motivation and threat model

One of the primary objectives of Docker EE with swarm mode is to provide an orchestrator with security built-in. To achieve this goal, we developed the first container orchestrator designed with the principle of least privilege in mind.

In computer science,the principle of least privilege in a distributed system requires that each participant of the system must only have access to  the information and resources that are necessary for its legitimate purpose. No Continue reading

What is a firewall?

Network-based firewalls have become almost ubiquitous across US enterprises for their proven defense against an ever-increasing array of threats.A recent study by network testing firm NSS Labs found that up to 80% of US large businesses run a next-generation firewall. Research firm IDC estimates the firewall and related unified threat management market was a $7.6 billion industry in 2015 and expected to reach $12.7 billion by 2020.What is a firewall? Firewalls act as a perimeter defense tool that monitor traffic and either allow it or block it. Over the years functionality of firewalls has increased, and now most firewalls can not only block a set of known threats and enforce advanced access control list policies, but they can also deeply inspect individual packets of traffic and test packets to determine if they’re safe. Most firewalls are deployed as network hardware that processes traffic and software that allow end users to configure and manage the system. Increasingly, software-only versions of firewalls are being deployed in highly virtualized environments to enforce policies on segmented networks or in the IaaS public cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What is a firewall?

Network-based firewalls have become almost ubiquitous across US enterprises for their proven defense against an ever-increasing array of threats.A recent study by network testing firm NSS Labs found that up to 80% of US large businesses run a next-generation firewall. Research firm IDC estimates the firewall and related unified threat management market was a $7.6 billion industry in 2015 and expected to reach $12.7 billion by 2020.What is a firewall? Firewalls act as a perimeter defense tool that monitor traffic and either allow it or block it. Over the years functionality of firewalls has increased, and now most firewalls can not only block a set of known threats and enforce advanced access control list policies, but they can also deeply inspect individual packets of traffic and test packets to determine if they’re safe. Most firewalls are deployed as network hardware that processes traffic and software that allow end users to configure and manage the system. Increasingly, software-only versions of firewalls are being deployed in highly virtualized environments to enforce policies on segmented networks or in the IaaS public cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What is a firewall?

Network-based firewalls have become almost ubiquitous across US enterprises for their proven defense against an ever-increasing array of threats.A recent study by network testing firm NSS Labs found that up to 80% of US large businesses run a next-generation firewall. Research firm IDC estimates the firewall and related unified threat management market was a $7.6 billion industry in 2015 and expected to reach $12.7 billion by 2020.What is a firewall? Firewalls act as a perimeter defense tool that monitor traffic and either allow it or block it. Over the years functionality of firewalls has increased, and now most firewalls can not only block a set of known threats and enforce advanced access control list policies, but they can also deeply inspect individual packets of traffic and test packets to determine if they’re safe. Most firewalls are deployed as network hardware that processes traffic and software that allow end users to configure and manage the system. Increasingly, software-only versions of firewalls are being deployed in highly virtualized environments to enforce policies on segmented networks or in the IaaS public cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New Paper on Online Privacy in the Wake of Pervasive Surveillance Revelations

In 2015, I was lucky enough to give an invited keynote at the 20th anniversary of the Ethicomp conference. I found that many of the issues up for discussion were ones in which the Internet Society also has a keen interest: for example — responsible innovation, the ethics of autonomous systems, and what do in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about pervasive state monitoring of the Internet. The conference has now produced a special edition of the Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society (JICES), specifically to report on a global set of surveys on the responses to Snowden. I was invited to write a paper for this special edition, to accompany the more traditional academic analyses of the surveys. My full article, “After Snowden – the evolving landscape of privacy and technology” is now available.

Writing the paper gave me a chance to step back and look at how the privacy advocacy community’s work has changed since Snowden – one of those rare moments in which the frog gets to hop out of the rapidly warming water and contemplate the saucepan. Here are a few of the trends I noted.

First, there has been Continue reading

Zodiac WX – Northbound Networks

A WiFi Base station using OpenFlow for $250. The Zodiac WX is the world’s first fully integrated OpenFlow® Wireless Access Point. It is a high powered ceiling / wall mountable Dual-Band AC1200 AP that includes 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports and support for PoE. We have integrated our Zodiac OpenFlow® engine directly into the wireless drivers so […]

“Responsible encryption” fallacies

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave a speech recently calling for "Responsible Encryption" (aka. "Crypto Backdoors"). It's full of dangerous ideas that need to be debunked.

The importance of law enforcement

The first third of the speech talks about the importance of law enforcement, as if it's the only thing standing between us and chaos. It cites the 2016 Mirai attacks as an example of the chaos that will only get worse without stricter law enforcement.

But the Mira case demonstrated the opposite, how law enforcement is not needed. They made no arrests in the case. A year later, they still haven't a clue who did it.

Conversely, we technologists have fixed the major infrastructure issues. Specifically, those affected by the DNS outage have moved to multiple DNS providers, including a high-capacity DNS provider like Google and Amazon who can handle such large attacks easily.

In other words, we the people fixed the major Mirai problem, and law-enforcement didn't.

Moreover, instead being a solution to cyber threats, law enforcement has become a threat itself. The DNC didn't have the FBI investigate the attacks from Russia likely because they didn't want the FBI reading all their files, finding wrongdoing by the Continue reading

Baidu Sheds Precision Without Paying Deep Learning Accuracy Cost

One of the reasons we have written so much about Chinese search and social web giant, Baidu, in the last few years is because they have openly described both the hardware and software steps to making deep learning efficient and high performance at scale.

In addition to providing several benchmarking efforts and GPU use cases, researchers at the company’s Silicon Valley AI Lab (SVAIL) have been at the forefront of eking power efficiency and performance out of new hardware by lowering precision. This is a trend that has kickstarted similar thinking in hardware usage in other areas, including supercomputing …

Baidu Sheds Precision Without Paying Deep Learning Accuracy Cost was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

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