netlab 1.9.6: Static Routes to Default Gateways

Last week, I had to push out netlab release 1.9.6 to address a particularly nasty Python dependency hell to make netlab work (again) on Ubuntu 24.04 (more details). The release also brought these goodies (and a bunch of bug fixes):

• Add default gateway (including anycast- and VRRP gateway )as a valid next-hop for static routes
• Rewrite the default gateway processing and add IPv6 default gateways on links without anycast or VRRP gateways
• Set libvirt MTU to 9500 on bridge-based networks to avoid the “transparent fragmentation” on Linux bridges.
• Use device- or node variables to specify the Juniper vMX license file.

Cloudflare incident on March 21, 2025

Multiple Cloudflare services, including R2 object storage, experienced an elevated rate of errors for 1 hour and 7 minutes on March 21, 2025 (starting at 21:38 UTC and ending 22:45 UTC). During the incident window, 100% of write operations failed and approximately 35% of read operations to R2 failed globally. Although this incident started with R2, it impacted other Cloudflare services including Cache Reserve, Images, Log Delivery, Stream, and Vectorize.

While rotating credentials used by the R2 Gateway service (R2's API frontend) to authenticate with our storage infrastructure, the R2 engineering team inadvertently deployed the new credentials (ID and key pair) to a development instance of the service instead of production. When the old credentials were deleted from our storage infrastructure (as part of the key rotation process), the production R2 Gateway service did not have access to the new credentials. This ultimately resulted in R2’s Gateway service not being able to authenticate with our storage backend. There was no data loss or corruption that occurred as part of this incident: any in-flight uploads or mutations that returned successful HTTP status codes were persisted.

Once the root cause was identified and we realized we hadn’t deployed Continue reading

HBM Can Keep Micron Out Of The Next Memory Bust Cycle

An interesting thought experiment to do in 2025 when looking at the financial results of just about any of the key compute, storage, and networking component and system suppliers is to imagine how any given company’s numbers would look if you backed out the AI portions of its business. …

HBM Can Keep Micron Out Of The Next Memory Bust Cycle was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

NB519: Google Bids $32 Billion for Cloud Security Startup; NVIDIA Makes Nice With Quantum Computing

0324 Tech Byte: Tech Bytes: How Fortinet Unified SASE Secures Hybrid Workers for Customer Liquid Networx (Sponsored)

Security Week 2025: in review

Thank you for following along with another Security Week at Cloudflare. We’re extremely proud of the work our team does to make the Internet safer and to help meet the challenge of emerging threats. As our CISO Grant Bourzikas outlined in his kickoff post this week, security teams are facing a landscape of rapidly increasing complexity introduced by vendor sprawl, an “AI Boom”, and an ever-growing surface area to protect.

As we continuously work to meet new challenges, Innovation Weeks like Security Week give us an invaluable opportunity to share our point of view and engage with the wider Internet community. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. We want to help safeguard the Internet from the arrival of quantum supercomputers, help protect the livelihood of content creators from unauthorized AI scraping, help raise awareness of the latest Internet threats, and help find new ways to help reduce the reuse of compromised passwords. Solving these challenges will take a village. We’re grateful to everyone who has engaged with us on these issues via social media, contributed to our open source repositories, and reached out through our technology partner program to work with us on the issues most Continue reading

New URLPattern API brings improved pattern matching to Node.js and Cloudflare Workers

Today, we are excited to announce that we have contributed an implementation of the URLPattern API to Node.js, and it is available starting with the v23.8.0 update. We've done this by adding our URLPattern implementation to Ada URL, the high-performance URL parser that now powers URL handling in both Node.js and Cloudflare Workers. This marks an important step toward bringing this API to the broader JavaScript ecosystem.

Cloudflare Workers has, from the beginning, embraced a standards-based JavaScript programming model, and Cloudflare was one of the founding companies for what has evolved into ECMA's 55th Technical Committee, focusing on interoperability between Web-interoperable runtimes like Workers, Node.js, Deno, and others. This contribution highlights and marks our commitment to this ongoing philosophy. Ensuring that all the JavaScript runtimes work consistently and offer at least a minimally consistent set of features is critical to ensuring the ongoing health of the ecosystem as a whole.

URLPattern API contribution is just one example of Cloudflare’s ongoing commitment to the open-source ecosystem. We actively contribute to numerous open-source projects including Node.js, V8, and Ada URL, while also maintaining our own open-source initiatives like workerd and wrangler. By upstreaming improvements Continue reading

KubeCon EU 2025: Aviatrix’s Enterprise Firewall for Kubernetes

Kubernetes networking admins attending Aviatrix will be demonstrating its new Kubernetes firewall. “One of the things which we didn’t have in the Kubernetes space is a really good Kubernetes-aware networking and security solution,” said Aviatrix Kubernetes Firewall  brings enterprise-levels of

IPv6 and the Revenge of the Stupid Bridges

This blog post describes another “OMG, this cannot possibly be true” scenario discovered during the netlab VRRP integration testing.

I wanted to test whether we got the nasty nuances of VRRPv3 IPv6 configuration right on all supported platforms and created a simple lab topology in which the device-under-test and an Arista cEOS container would be connected to two IPv6 networks (Arista EOS is a lovely device to use when testing a VRRP cluster because it produces JSON-formatted show vrrp printouts).

Most platforms worked as expected, but Aruba CX, Cumulus Linux with NVUE, and Dell OS10 consistently failed the tests. We were stumped until Jeroen van Bemmel discovered that the Arista container forwards IPv6 router advertisements between the two LAN segments.

Exploring RISC-V vector instructions

It finally happened! A raspberry pi like device, with a RISC-V CPU supporting the v extension. Aka RVV. Aka vector instructions.

I bought one, and explored it a bit.

SIMD background

First some background on SIMD.

SIMD is a set of instructions allowing you to do the same operation to multiple independent pieces of data. As an example, say you had four 8 bit integers, and you wanted to multiply them all by 2, then add 1. You could do this with a single operation without any special instructions.

    # x86 example assembly.

    mov eax, [myvalues]  # load our four bytes.
    mov ebx, 2           # we want to multiply by two
    imul eax, ebx        # single operation, multiple data!
                         # After this, eax contains 0x02040608
    add eax, 0x01010101  # single operation, multiple data!
                         # After this, eax contains 0x03050709
    mov [myvalues], eax  # store back the new value.

section .data
  myvalues db 1,2,3,4

Success, right? No, of course not. This naive code doesn’t handle over/underflow, and doesn’t even remotely work for floating point data. For that, we need special SIMD instructions.

x86 and ARM have gone the way of fixed sized registers. In 1997 Intel introduced MMX, to great Continue reading

Lab as Code – Part2

This is the follow on to part1 where I was looking at how easy it is to deploy initial EVE-NG and CML lab setups from a declarative YAML file. Although both products are not really designed with that in mind I did manage to accomplish it with a relatively minimal amount of complexity in the topology file using a custom lab_builder tool. Next up is to give it a go with containerlab and netlab, I am expecting these to be a whole lot simpler as lab as code is the very ethos that they are designed for.

From Python to Go 017. Interaction With Network Devices Using NETCONF.

Hello my friend,

We continue exploring programmable network management using Python and Go (Golang) as programming languages. In today’s blog post we’ll cover how to interact with network devices using NETCONF.

How To Chose Which API To Use?

There are many APIs (Application Programmable Interfaces) out there. We already covered SSH and now covering NETCONF. And there are a few more existing, which we are going to cover. Cannot we just stick to a single API for all use cases. The truth is that each API has its own advantages and disadvantages, as well as design patterns and areas, where it shall be used. As such, each of them is important and valuable.

And in our training programs we do deep-dive in all these APIs. Enrol today:

We offer the following training programs in network automation for you:

• Zero-to-Hero Network Automation Training
• High-scale automation with Nornir
• Ansible Automation Orchestration with Ansble Tower / AWX
• Expert-level training: Closed-loop Automation and Next-generation Monitoring

During these trainings you will learn the following topics:

• Success and failure strategies to build the automation tools.
• Principles of software developments and the most useful and convenient tools.
• Data encoding (free-text, XML, JSON, YAML, Protobuf).
• Model-driven Continue reading

HN773: Optimizing Ethernet for AI – An Update On the Ultra Ethernet Consortium

TNO021: An Operator’s Perspective on NetOps and Programming

Hedge 263: NFTs

How do Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, impact value and the future of all things digital? How are they different from–and similar to–blockchain? Jaime Schwarz joins Russ White and Tom Ammon to talk about what NFTs are, how they work, and how they might impact the future.
 

 
download

RDP without the risk: Cloudflare’s browser-based solution for secure third-party access

Short-lived SSH access made its debut on Cloudflare’s SASE platform in October 2024. Leveraging the knowledge gained through the BastionZero acquisition, short-lived SSH access enables organizations to apply Zero Trust controls in front of their Linux servers. That was just the beginning, however, as we are thrilled to announce the release of a long-requested feature: clientless, browser-based support for the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Built on top of Cloudflare’s modern proxy architecture, our RDP proxy offers a secure and performant solution that, critically, is also easy to set up, maintain, and use.

Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) was born in 1998 with Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition. If you have never heard of that Windows version, it’s because, well, there’s been 16 major Windows releases since then. Regardless, RDP is still used across thousands of organizations to enable remote access to Windows servers. It’s a bit of a strange protocol that relies on a graphical user interface to display screen captures taken in very close succession in order to emulate the interactions on the remote Windows server. (There’s more happening here beyond the screen captures, including drawing commands, bitmap updates, and even video streams. Continue reading

Detecting sensitive data and misconfigurations in AWS and GCP with Cloudflare One

Today is the final day of Security Week 2025, and after a great week of blog posts across a variety of topics, we’re excited to share the latest on Cloudflare’s data security products.

This announcement takes us to Cloudflare’s SASE platform, Cloudflare One, used by enterprise security and IT teams to manage the security of their employees, applications, and third-party tools, all in one place.

Starting today, Cloudflare One users can now use the CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) product to integrate with and scan Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 and Google Cloud Storage, for posture- and Data Loss Prevention (DLP)-related security issues. Create a free account to check it out.

Scanning both point-in-time and continuously, users can identify misconfigurations in Identity and Access Management (IAM), bucket, and object settings, and detect sensitive information, like Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, or any other pattern using regex, in cloud storage objects.

Over the last few years, our customers — predominantly security and IT teams — have told us about their appreciation for CASB’s simplicity and effectiveness as a SaaS security product. Its number of supported integrations, its ease of setup, and speed in identifying critical issues Continue reading

Enhance data protection in Microsoft Outlook with Cloudflare One’s new DLP Assist

Cloudflare Email Security customers using Microsoft Outlook can now enhance their data protection using our new DLP Assist capability. This application scans emails in real time as users compose them, identifying potential data loss prevention (DLP) violations, such as Social Security or credit card numbers. Administrators can instantly alert users of violations and take action downstream, whether by blocking or encrypting messages, to prevent sensitive information from leaking. DLP Assist is lightweight, easy to deploy, and helps organizations maintain compliance without disrupting workflow.

After speaking with our customers, we discovered a common challenge: many wanted to implement a data loss prevention policy for Outlook, but found existing solutions either too complex to set up or too costly to adopt.

That’s why we created DLP Assist to be a lightweight application that can be installed in minutes. Unlike other solutions, it doesn’t require changes to outbound email connectors or provide concerns about IP reputation to customers. By fully leveraging the Microsoft ecosystem, DLP Assist makes email DLP accessible to all organizations, whether they have dedicated IT teams or none at all.

We also recognized that traditional DLP solutions often demand significant financial investment in not just software Continue reading

Prepping for post-quantum: a beginner’s guide to lattice cryptography

The cryptography that secures the Internet is evolving, and it's time to catch up. This post is a tutorial on lattice cryptography, the paradigm at the heart of the post-quantum (PQ) transition.

Twelve years ago (in 2013), the revelation of mass surveillance in the US kicked off the widespread adoption of TLS for encryption and authentication on the web. This transition was buoyed by the standardization and implementation of new, more efficient public-key cryptography based on elliptic curves. Elliptic curve cryptography was both faster and required less communication than its predecessors, including RSA and Diffie-Hellman over finite fields.

Today's transition to PQ cryptography addresses a looming threat for TLS and beyond: once built, a sufficiently large quantum computer can be used to break all public-key cryptography in use today. And we continue to see advancements in quantum-computer engineering that bring us closer to this threat becoming a reality.

Fortunately, this transition is well underway. The research and standards communities have spent the last several years developing alternatives that resist quantum cryptanalysis. For its part, Cloudflare has contributed to this process and is an early adopter of newly developed schemes. In fact, PQ encryption has been available at our edge since Continue reading

Improving Data Loss Prevention accuracy with AI-powered context analysis

We are excited to announce our latest innovation to Cloudflare’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution: a self-improving AI-powered algorithm that adapts to your organization’s unique traffic patterns to reduce false positives. 

Many customers are plagued by the shapeshifting task of identifying and protecting their sensitive data as it moves within and even outside of their organization. Detecting this data through deterministic means, such as regular expressions, often fails because they cannot identify details that are categorized as personally identifiable information (PII) nor intellectual property (IP). This can generate a high rate of false positives, which contributes to noisy alerts that subsequently may lead to review fatigue. Even more critically, this less than ideal experience can turn users away from relying on our DLP product and result in a reduction in their overall security posture. 

Built into Cloudflare’s DLP Engine, AI enables us to intelligently assess the contents of a document or HTTP request in parallel with a customer’s historical reports to determine context similarity and draw conclusions on data sensitivity with increased accuracy.

In this blog post, we’ll explore DLP AI Context Analysis, its implementation using Workers AI and Vectorize, and future improvements we’re developing.