Geo Key Manager: Setting up a service for scale

Geo Key Manager: Setting up a service for scale

In 2017, we launched Geo Key Manager, a service that allows Cloudflare customers to choose where they store their TLS certificate private keys. For example, if a US customer only wants its private keys stored in US data centers, we can make that happen. When a user from Tokyo makes a request to this website or API, it first hits the Tokyo data center. As the Tokyo data center lacks access to the private key, it contacts a data center in the US to terminate the TLS request. Once the TLS session is established, the Tokyo data center can serve future requests. For a detailed description of how this works, refer to this post on Geo Key Manager.

This is a story about the evolution of systems in response to increase in scale and scope. Geo Key Manager started off as a small research project and, as it got used more and more, wasn’t scaling as well as we wanted it to. This post describes the challenges Geo Key Manager is facing today, particularly from a networking standpoint, and some of the steps along its way to a truly scalable service.

Geo Key Manager started out as a research Continue reading

A dive into Kyndryl, IBM’s managed-services spin-off

Thanks to  a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing new details have emerged about Kyndryl, the IBM spin-off of its managed-infrastructure services unit into a separately traded public company.Kyndryl does exactly what the managed-infrastructure services unit of IBM’s Global Technology Services segment does: manage enterprises IT infrastructure, whether it comes from IBM or another vendor. That’s a challenge for Kyndryl because it has to deal with the trend toward cloud services and against on-premises infrastructure.The split is expected to be complete by the end of 2021, and when it was announced last year, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said IBM will focus on open hybrid-cloud and AI capabilities while Kyndryl would focus on modernizing customer infrastructure.To read this article in full, please click here

Lessons Learned: Complexity Will Kill Your System

You wouldn’t believe the intricate network designs I created decades ago until I learned that having uninterrupted sleep is worth more than proving I can get the impossible to work (see also: using EBGP instead of IGP in a 4-node data center fabric).

Once I started valuing my free time, I tried to design things to be as simple as possible. However, as my friend Nicola Modena once said, “Consultants must propose new technologies because they must be seen as bringing innovation,” and we all know complexity sells. Go figure.

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Lessons Learned: Complexity Will Kill Your System

You wouldn’t believe the intricate network designs I created decades ago until I learned that having an uninterrupted sleep is worth more than proving I can get the impossible to work (see also: using EBGP instead of IGP in a 4-node data center fabric).

Once I started valuing my free time, I tried to design things to be as simple as possible. However, as my friend Nicola Modena once said, “Consultants must propose new technologies because they must be seen as bringing innovation,” and we all know complexity sells. Go figure.

Watch the video
You’ll need a Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video.

Missing good old ‘wr’ command on N9K? let’s bring it back!

Doing a lot on Nexus 9000 series datacenter boxes (N9K) lately? Sure you’re missing the good old ‘wr’ command to save your last startup-config into running-config. NXOS architecture guys decided that you should be really well concentrated when deciding to save your nice new configuration to survive device reboot and type: N9K_1(config)# copy running-config startup-config. Just typing ‘wr’ into the console would be too nice right? Let’s use the alias configuration and bring that command back to the box. N9K_1(config)# copy running-config startup-config 100% Copy complete, now saving to disk (please wait)... Copy complete. N9K_1(config)# If you try ‘wr’:

The post Missing good old ‘wr’ command on N9K? let’s bring it back! appeared first on How Does Internet Work.

Calico Cloud: What’s new in October

Calico Cloud is an industry-first security and observability SaaS platform for Kubernetes, containers, and cloud. Since its launch, we have seen customers use Calico Cloud to address a range of security and observability problems for regulatory and compliance requirements in a matter of days and weeks. In addition, they only paid for the services used, instead of an upfront investment commitment, thus aligning their budgets with their business needs.

New in October

We are excited to announce recent Calico Cloud enhancements. Highlights include:

  • Managing your security and observability shouldn’t require you to manage a separate credential, authentication, and authorization access workflow. With Calico Cloud, you can bring your identity provider to manage user access to your security and observability platform. Simple sign in now requires login with the same credentials aligned to organizational roles. User management is simplified by leveraging in-house knowledge of identity management for many popular platforms. Calico Cloud supports Microsoft Azure Active Directory, Google IDP, and Open ID.
  • Pre-built use case workflows are available in Calico Cloud for workload access control and enterprise security and controls. After signup:
    • Users can start monitoring and observing their application and microservices communication to external resources within minutes.
    • Users can prevent Continue reading

How to Protect Your Cell Phone from Malicious Wi-Fi

One of the most common vulnerabilities that many people face is the malicious Wi-Fi, which can be accessed without entering a password. Wi-Fi networks with no password are especially prone to cyber-attacks and data theft. A malicious Wi-Fi hotspot can be a nightmare for your cell phone. These hotspots are often used by hackers to intercept data exchanged between your phone and the internet.

Update Your OS and apps

It is important to update your operating system because it can make you vulnerable to threats and attacks. The OS will have all the latest updates that are released, so updating your OS will keep it secure in many ways. Some of the ways updating your OS keeps you safe are by having a better built-in firewall and antivirus software. Updating your OS is also important because it can improve the performance of your computer.

Avoid Public Wi-Fi

Public Wi-Fi is not secure and can lead to serious consequences. Public Wi-Fi networks are often unsecured. Unsecured networks can give cybercriminals access to your device and your personal data. If you use public Wi-Fi then you may be putting yourself at risk for identity theft because hackers can access your personal information Continue reading

Flexible Automation For A Complex Enterprise: Gluware LiveStream Video [4/8]

Angelo Rossi, GNS LAN-WAN Architect at WSP joins Drew Conry-Murray of the Packet Pushers to explain how WSP automated their brownfield network with Gluware. If Gluware might be a fit for your network automation needs, visit here. Thanks! You can subscribe to the Packet Pushers’ YouTube channel for more videos as they are published. It’s […]

The post Flexible Automation For A Complex Enterprise: Gluware LiveStream Video [4/8] appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Privacy-Preserving Compromised Credential Checking

Privacy-Preserving Compromised Credential Checking
Privacy-Preserving Compromised Credential Checking

Today we’re announcing a public demo and an open-sourced Go implementation of a next-generation, privacy-preserving compromised credential checking protocol called MIGP (“Might I Get Pwned”, a nod to Troy Hunt’s “Have I Been Pwned”). Compromised credential checking services are used to alert users when their credentials might have been exposed in data breaches. Critically, the ‘privacy-preserving’ property of the MIGP protocol means that clients can check for leaked credentials without leaking any information to the service about the queried password, and only a small amount of information about the queried username. Thus, not only can the service inform you when one of your usernames and passwords may have become compromised, but it does so without exposing any unnecessary information, keeping credential checking from becoming a vulnerability itself. The ‘next-generation’ property comes from the fact that MIGP advances upon the current state of the art in credential checking services by allowing clients to not only check if their exact password is present in a data breach, but to check if similar passwords have been exposed as well.

For example, suppose your password last year was amazon20\$, and you change your password each year (so your current password is amazon21\$). Continue reading

Unbuckling the narrow waist of IP: Addressing Agility for Names and Web Services

Unbuckling the narrow waist of IP: Addressing Agility for Names and Web Services
Unbuckling the narrow waist of IP: Addressing Agility for Names and Web Services

At large operational scales, IP addressing stifles innovation in network- and web-oriented services. For every architectural change, and certainly when starting to design new systems, the first set of questions we are forced to ask are:

  • Which block of IP addresses do or can we use?
  • Do we have enough in IPv4? If not, where or how can we get them?
  • How do we use IPv6 addresses, and does this affect other uses of IPv6?
  • Oh, and what careful plan, checks, time, and people do we need for migration?

Having to stop and worry about IP addresses costs time, money, resources. This may sound surprising, given the visionary and resilient advent of IP, 40+ years ago. By their very design, IP addresses should be the last thing that any network has to think about. However, if the Internet has laid anything bare, it’s that small or seemingly unimportant weaknesses — often invisible or impossible to see at design time — always show up at sufficient scale.

One thing we do know: “more addresses” should never be the answer. In IPv4 that type of thinking only contributes to their scarcity, driving up further their market prices. IPv6 is absolutely necessary, Continue reading

Research Directions in Password Security

Research Directions in Password Security
Research Directions in Password Security

As Internet users, we all deal with passwords every day. With so many different services, each with their own login systems, we have to somehow keep track of the credentials we use with each of these services. This situation leads some users to delegate credential storage to password managers like LastPass or a browser-based password manager, but this is far from universal. Instead, many people still rely on old-fashioned human memory, which has its limitations — leading to reused passwords and to security problems. This blog post discusses how Cloudflare Research is exploring how to minimize password exposure and thwart password attacks.

The Problem of Password Reuse

Because it’s too difficult to remember many distinct passwords, people often reuse them across different online services. When breached password datasets are leaked online, attackers can take advantage of these to conduct “credential stuffing attacks”. In a credential stuffing attack, an attacker tests breached credentials against multiple online login systems in an attempt to hijack user accounts. These attacks are highly effective because users tend to reuse the same credentials across different websites, and they have quickly become one of the most prevalent types of online guessing attacks. Automated attacks can be run Continue reading

Google Muscles Its Way Into Datacenters, Attacks From The Edge

Thomas Kurian’s arrival at Google Cloud in early 2019 after more than 22 years at Oracle marked a significant shift in Google’s thinking, putting an emphasis on expanding its cloud’s business use by enterprises as the key to making up ground on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure in the booming global cloud market. …

Google Muscles Its Way Into Datacenters, Attacks From The Edge was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Fact check: that “forensics” of the Mesa image is crazy

Tina Peters, the elections clerk from Mesa County (Colorado) went rogue, creating a "disk-image" of the election server, and posting that image to the public Internet. Conspiracy theorists have been analyzing the disk-image trying to find anomalies supporting their conspiracy-theories. A recent example is this "forensics" report. In this blogpost, I debunk that report.

I suppose calling somebody a "conspiracy theorist" is insulting, but there's three objective ways we can identify them as such.

The first is when they use the logic "everything we can't explain is proof of the conspiracy". In other words, since there's no other rational explanation, the only remaining explanation is the conspiracy-theory. But there can be other possible explanations -- just ones unknown to the person because they aren't smart enough to understand them. We see that here: the person writing this report doesn't understand some basic concepts, like "airgapped" networks.

This leads to the second way to recognize a conspiracy-theory, when it demands this one thing that'll clear things up. Here, it's demanding that a manual audit/recount of Mesa County be performed. But it won't satisfy them. The Maricopa audit in neighboring Colorado, whose recount found no fraud, didn't clear anything up Continue reading

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