Join forces to eliminate spam – read the new report from the CRTC

What are the best ways to reduce spam? How can we work together to reduce this threat and create a more trusted Internet? 

Last October, in the vibrant city of Bangkok, the Internet Society joined regulators for an in-depth conversation about how to eliminate spam and its harmful effects. Our kind hosts were the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and the International Institute of Communications (ICC). 

Christine Runnegar

The Future Of SDN Is Up In The Air

The announcement this week that Riverbed is buying Xirrus was a huge sign that the user-facing edge of the network is the new battleground for SDN and SD-WAN adoption. Riverbed is coming off a number of recent acquisitions in the SDN space, including Ocedo just over a year ago. So, why then, would Riverbed chase down a wireless company when they’re so focused on the wiring behind the walls?

The New User Experience

When SDN was a pile of buzzwords attached to an idea that had just come out of Stanford, a lot of people were trying to figure out just what exactly SDN could offer them in terms of their network. Things like network slicing were the first big pieces to be put up before things like orchestration, programmability, and APIs were really brought to the fore. People were trying to figure out how to make this hot new thing work for them. Well, almost everyone.

Wireless professionals are a bit jaded when it comes to SDN. That’s because they’ve seen it already in the form of controller-based solutions. The idea that a central device can issue commands to remote access devices and control configurations easily? Airespace was doing Continue reading

Phishing attacks using internationalized domains are hard to block

The latest version of Google Chrome, released earlier this week, restricts how domain names that use non-Latin characters are displayed in the browser. This change is in response to a recently disclosed technique that could allow attackers to create highly credible phishing websites.The ability to register domain names made up of characters like those found in the Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Hebrew and other non-Latin alphabets dates back over a decade. Since 2009, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has also approved a large number of internationalized top-level domains (TLDs) -- domain extensions -- written with such characters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Phishing attacks using internationalized domains are hard to block

The latest version of Google Chrome, released earlier this week, restricts how domain names that use non-Latin characters are displayed in the browser. This change is in response to a recently disclosed technique that could allow attackers to create highly credible phishing websites.The ability to register domain names made up of characters like those found in the Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Hebrew and other non-Latin alphabets dates back over a decade. Since 2009, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has also approved a large number of internationalized top-level domains (TLDs) -- domain extensions -- written with such characters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AES-CBC is going the way of the dodo

A little over a year ago, Nick Sullivan talked about the beginning of the end for AES-CBC cipher suites, following a plethora of attacks on this cipher mode.

Today we can safely confirm that this prediction is coming true, as for the first time ever the share of AES-CBC cipher suites on Cloudflare’s edge network dropped below that of ChaCha20-Poly1305 suites, and is fast approaching the 10% mark.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by aesop

Over the course of the last six months, AES-CBC shed more than 33% of its “market” share, dropping from 20% to just 13.4%.

Ciphers

All of that share, went to AES-GCM, that currently encrypts over 71.2% of all connections. ChaCha20-Poly1305 is stable, with 15.3% of all connections opting for that cipher. Surprisingly 3DES is still around, with 0.1% of the connections.

The internal AES-CBC cipher suite breakdown as follows:

CBC

The majority of AES-CBC connections use ECDHE-RSA or RSA key exchange, and not ECDHE-ECDSA, which implies that we mostly deal with older clients.

RSA is also dying

In other good new, the use of ECDSA surpassed that of RSA at the beginning of the year. Currently more than 60% of all connections use Continue reading

Users’ orders: Make it easier to build hybrid clouds

A funny thing happened on the way to the hybrid cloud: Building the infrastructure was a pain in the neck.That's what enterprise IT people in the Open Networking User Group have discovered Last year, public cloud providers persuaded C-level executives to move significant corporate workloads to the cloud, but the tools weren't there to make it work, said Nick Lippis, co-founder and co-chairman of ONUG."There is a ton of custom work that has to be done," Lippis said.So the user group, which includes IT executives from hundreds of enterprises, chose building hybrid cloud infrastructure as its focus for this year. It will be the main topic at ONUG Spring 2017, taking place next week in San Francisco.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Users’ orders: Make it easier to build hybrid clouds

A funny thing happened on the way to the hybrid cloud: Building the infrastructure was a pain in the neck.That's what enterprise IT people in the Open Networking User Group have discovered Last year, public cloud providers persuaded C-level executives to move significant corporate workloads to the cloud, but the tools weren't there to make it work, said Nick Lippis, co-founder and co-chairman of ONUG."There is a ton of custom work that has to be done," Lippis said.So the user group, which includes IT executives from hundreds of enterprises, chose building hybrid cloud infrastructure as its focus for this year. It will be the main topic at ONUG Spring 2017, taking place next week in San Francisco.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researchers build a microprocessor from flexible materials

Researchers have built a primitive microprocessor out of a two-dimensional material similar to graphene, the flexible conductive wonder material that some believe will revolutionize the design and manufacture of batteries, sensors and chips.With only 115 transistors, their processor isn't going to top any benchmark rankings, but it's "a first step towards the development of microprocessors based on 2D semiconductors," the researchers at Vienna University of Technology said in a paper published in the journal Nature this month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DARPA opens massive “Colosseum” to develop radical wireless applications

DARPA today said it the opened unique and massive testbed it will use as a battleground for researchers to build and test autonomous, intelligent and collaborative wireless technologies.Calling it a “magnificent electronic arena” The Colosseum will be primarily used to host the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s $3.75 million three-year Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2), which will pit researchers against each other to develop what the agency calls radically new technologies for “using and managing access to the electromagnetic spectrum in both military and civilian domains.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DARPA opens massive “Colosseum” to develop radical wireless applications

DARPA today said it the opened unique and massive testbed it will use as a battleground for researchers to build and test autonomous, intelligent and collaborative wireless technologies.Calling it a “magnificent electronic arena” The Colosseum will be primarily used to host the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s $3.75 million three-year Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2), which will pit researchers against each other to develop what the agency calls radically new technologies for “using and managing access to the electromagnetic spectrum in both military and civilian domains.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here