Cisco lining up hyperconvergence deal?

Cisco is reportedly preparing a hyperconvergence appliance through an OEM arrangement with start-up Springpath. According to CRN and The Register, Cisco has invested an undisclosed amount in Springpath as a prelude to the introduction of a hyperconvergence appliance combining Cisco’s UCS server platform with Springpath’s software, which enables compute, storage, networking and virtualization to run on an x86 server.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researcher finds flaw in Comcast XFINITY home security system

Comcast’s XFINITY Home Security System can be readily exploited so it registers that doors and windows in customers’ homes are closed when they are actually open, Rapid7 has discovered.Fixing the problem requires a software or firmware upgrade, Rapid7 says. Comcast hasn’t responded to Rapid7s November notifications about the flaw, the company says.SHOCKER! Cape Cod cops find iPhone stun gunComcast hasn’t responded to an email asking for comment, but this story will be updated when it does.The security system consists of a sensor placed at windows, doors and other locations to detect motion, and a base station. When the sensor is triggered, it notifies the base station, which alarms that there is an intrusion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IS-IS Design: Avoiding Traffic Blackholing

IS-IS, a link state routing protocol, requires careful attention during network design in order to avoid traffic blackholing. In the topology below, IS-IS routing protocol is used. The primary path is the blue link. Using IS-IS, the overload bit signals the BGP. If the overload bit is set on Router B, Router A does not use router B as […]

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Flaws in Comcast’s Xfinity Home Security: System fails to warn homeowners of intruders

Rapid7 disclosed serious flaws in Comcast’s Xfinity Home Security system which thieves or thugs could exploit to break into homes while the homeowners continue to receive 'it’s-all-good' messages even as an intruder moves about the house. Even worse, there currently is no fix.Comcast customers might be induced to sign up for one of the Xfinity Home Security packages as the company suggests options like being able to check in on your kids, your pets, and “the things you love most.” With Xfinity Home Security, Comcast said you can “Sit back. Relax. You’re in control.” But today Rapid7 publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in Xfinity Home Security, flaws that can cause the security system to fail to sense motion and instead continue to report “All sensors are intact and all doors are closed. No motion is detected.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security ‘net: Student privacy in focus

Student Privacy in Focus

Driving your market back to the earliest age possible is a tried and true marketing technique — and technology companies are no different in this regard. Getting people hooked on a product at an early age is a sure fire way to build a lifelong habit of preference for that one brand, and for usage in general. Perhaps, though, we should be concerned when it comes to social media. As “edtech” makes its way into our schools, should we be concerned about the privacy of our children? Via CDT:

Schools have largely embraced education applications, websites, and devices (collectively referred to as “edtech”) as a means for improving classroom instruction and administration. 71 percent of parents report their child uses technology provided by schools for educational purposes. In most cases this means more data is being collected on students. However, US privacy law has not kept pace with the rapid adoption of technology and data collection in schools. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), our existing student privacy law, is outdated and there are no sector-specific privacy laws that focus on edtech.

How effective is anonymization, anyway? A good bit of research is showing Continue reading

Comcast’s Xfinity Home Security vulnerable, fail open flaw leaves homes exposed

Researchers at Rapid7 have disclosed vulnerabilities in Comcast's Xfinity Home Security offerings. The flaws cause the system to falsely report that a home's windows and doors are closed and secured, even if they've been opened.Comcast's Xfinity Home Security system is one of the many next-generation alarm systems that are app controlled and promise to deliver real-time alerts and notifications to homeowners.However, researchers at Rapid7 have discovered flaws that would cause Comcast's system to falsely report that a home's doors and windows are closed and properly secured, even if they've been opened. In addition, the flaws also mean that Comcast's system would fail to sense an intruder's motion in the home.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google fixes dangerous rooting vulnerabilities in Android

Google has fixed a new batch of vulnerabilities in Android that could allow hackers to take over devices remotely or through malicious applications.The company released over-the-air firmware updates for its Nexus devices Monday and will publish the patches to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) repository by Wednesday. Manufacturers that are Google partners received the fixes in advance on Dec. 7, and will release updates according to their own schedules.The new patches address six critical, two high and five moderate vulnerabilities. The most serious flaw is located in the mediaserver Android component, a core part of the operating system that handles media playback and corresponding file metadata parsing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware NSX and Split and Smear Micro-Segmentation

While external perimeter protection requirements will most likely command hardware acceleration and support for the foreseeable future, the distributed nature of the services inside the data center calls for a totally different set of specifications.

Some vendors have recently claimed they can achieve micro-segmentation at data center scale while maintaining a hardware architecture. As I described in my recent article in Network Computing, this is unlikely because you have to factor in speed and capacity.

To quickly recap the main points describing the model in the article:

  • Our objective is for all security perimeters to have a diameter of one—i.e. deploying one security function for each service or VM in the data center—if we want to granularly apply policies and limit successful attacks from propagating laterally within a perimeter. A larger diameter implies we chose to ignore all inter-service communications within that perimeter.
  • This objective is impossible to achieve with our traditional hardware-based perimeters: The service densities and the network speeds found in current data center designs overrun any hardware-based inline inspection models.
  • The solution resides in “splitting and smearing” security functions across thousands of servers. This requires an operational model capable of managing large scale distributed functions Continue reading

Datacenter Design: Shortest Path Bridging

IEEE 802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) uses IS-IS as an underlying control plane mechanism that allows all the links in the topology to be active. In sum, it supports layer 2 multipath. SPB is used in the datacenter; however, it can also be used in the local area network. In this article, Figure-1 will be used to […]

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IS-IS vs. OSPF Part I: First steps in understanding IS-IS

The theme question is actually quite a good one, because it may seem like the fight has already been won by IS-IS in the Service Provider segment, and by OSPF on the enterprise market. So why ask it then? Well, because I got the following answer one too many times: “IS-IS is awesome, OSPF not so much. I have no idea how IS-IS works but it’s great. OSPF is so complicated and offers so little flexibility…”.

Well, that’s really wrong from my point of view. No protocol can be neither awesome nor despicable. They both offer you advantages and disadvantages, and knowing how they both work will help you make the best decision based on the needs of the network, not just because people say one is “great” and the other is not.

So, I am going to follow the steps I took to come to terms with IS-IS, and then we’ll see together, even though you’ll probably figure it out for yourselves by then, the comparative analysis of the two IGPs.

 

Step 1: Understanding CLNS & CLNP

Often network engineers freak out when they hear about the OSI stack, CLNP (Connectionless Network Protocol) and CLNS (Connectionless Network Service). Continue reading

ZigBee and Thread act to make their IoT smarts stack up

Two pieces in the complicated puzzle of smart-home options will snap together later this year when the ZigBee Alliance starts certifying devices that use the Thread protocol for networking. The industry groups behind these two systems have agreed to work out how they can both be integrated into the same product: Thread for exchanging data packets with other devices and ZigBee for defining how applications work on the device. This should lead to ZigBee products that can talk to many more devices in the Internet of Things. As the latest edition of the International CES trade show begins on Tuesday, consumers are faced with a slew of new standards, protocols and frameworks to tie home IoT products together as an easily managed system. On Monday, the Wi-Fi Alliance announced it's finished a new specification it calls Wi-Fi HaLow, which uses less power so it can work in small battery-powered devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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