HN790: From Rule-Based to Goal-Based: Rethinking Autonomous AI Operations (Sponsored)

On Heavy Networking today, AI operations for networking. That is, how do we delegate some amount of responsibility for network operations to artificial intelligence? Cisco is our sponsor, and our guests are Omar Sultan, Director for Product Management of Automation and AI; and Javier Antich, Chief Mad Scientist for AI (yes, that’s his title!). We talk... Read more »

Vulnerability disclosure on SSL for SaaS v1 (Managed CNAME)

Earlier this year, a group of external researchers identified and reported a vulnerability in Cloudflare’s SSL for SaaS v1 (Managed CNAME) product offering through Cloudflare’s bug bounty program. We officially deprecated SSL for SaaS v1 in 2021; however, some customers received extensions for extenuating circumstances that prevented them from migrating to SSL for SaaS v2 (Cloudflare for SaaS). We have continually worked with the remaining customers to migrate them onto Cloudflare for SaaS over the past four years and have successfully migrated the vast majority of these customers. For most of our customers, there is no action required; for the very small number of SaaS v1 customers, we will be actively working to help migrate you to SSL for SaaS v2 (Cloudflare for SaaS).

Background on SSL for SaaS v1 at Cloudflare

Back in 2017, Cloudflare announced SSL for SaaS, a product that allows SaaS providers to extend the benefits of Cloudflare security and performance to their end customers. Using a “Managed CNAME” configuration, providers could bring their customer’s domain onto Cloudflare. In the first version of SSL for SaaS (v1), the traffic for Custom Hostnames is proxied to the origin based on the IP addresses assigned to the Continue reading

For Financial Services Firms, AI Inference Is As Challenging As Training

A decade ago, when traditional machine learning techniques were first being commercialized, training was incredibly hard and expensive, but because models were relatively small, inference – running new data through a model to cause an application to act or react – was easy. …

For Financial Services Firms, AI Inference Is As Challenging As Training was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IEPG at IETF 123

he IEPG meeting is held each Sunday at the start of the IETF week. There is no particular theme for these sessions, although subjects of operational relevance are encouraged (www.iepg.org). These are my impressions of the presentations that were made at this IEPG meeting att the start of IETF 123.

Top 5 Kubernetes Network Issues You Can Catch Early with Calico Whisker

Kubernetes networking is deceptively simple on the surface, until it breaks, silently leaks data, or opens the door to a full-cluster compromise. As modern workloads become more distributed and ephemeral, traditional logging and metrics just can’t keep up with the complexity of cloud-native traffic flows.

That’s where Calico Whisker comes in. Whisker is a lightweight Kubernetes-native observability tool created by Tigera. It offers deep insights into real-time traffic flow patterns, without requiring you to deploy heavyweight service meshes or packet sniffer. And here’s something you won’t get anywhere else: Whisker is data plane-agnostic. Whether you run Calico eBPF data plane, nftables, or iptables, you’ll get the same high-fidelity flow logs with consistent fields, format, and visibility. You don’t have to change your data plane, Whisker fits right in and shows you the truth, everywhere.

Let’s walk through 5 network issues Whisker helps you catch early, before they turn into outages or security incidents.

1. Policy Misconfigurations

Traditional observability tools often show whether a packet was forwarded, accepted or dropped, but not why. They lack visibility into which Kubernetes network policy was responsible or if one was even applied.

With Whisker, each network flow is paired with:

PP072: Mobile Device Threat Management

Mobile devices blur the boundaries between personal and work devices and are packed with sensitive information, making them popular targets for malware, spyware, and data collection. On today’s Packet Protector we dig into strategies for managing threats to mobile devices with guest Akili Akridge. Akili started his career pulling burner phones off suspects as a... Read more »

Mythbusting IPv6: Why Adoption Lags and What Will Change It

IPv6 was developed in the late 1990s as a successor to IPv4 to address the internet’s rapid growth and prevent IPv4 address exhaustion. The original vision was that, after a period of dual-stack operation, IPv4 would be phased out. Over 25 years later, full-scale depletion of IPv4 addresses is imminent, yet IPv6 adoption remains slow — currently only about 30% worldwide, with the same proportion of Alexa Top 1,000 websites reachable via IPv6. The timeline for a full transition remains uncertain. Understanding IP Addresses: The Internet’s Postal System Before diving into the complexities of IPv6 adoption, it’s essential to understand what these protocols actually do. Think of IP addresses as the internet’s equivalent of postal addresses — they tell data packets where to go across the vast network of interconnected computers that make up the internet. IPv4 vs. IPv6 address space: A scale comparison The scale difference is staggering.

HW057: Orb – A New Tool for Monitoring Internet Connectivity

Orb is an intelligent app and platform designed to help consumers understand and improve their internet connectivity. Orb continuously monitors networks to give a complete picture of true internet experience, beyond just peak speed. Today’s guest, Doug Suttles, CEO and co-founder of Orb, explains exactly what Orb does, including speed, responsiveness and reliability testing, plus... Read more »

Cisco’s Outshift Incubator Sends Agentic AI Protocol To The Linux Foundation

AI agents bring with them the promise of being able to autonomously solve complex tasks put before them, from finding and analyzing the necessary data, choosing tools, and making decisions without human intervention to learning from their mistakes and adapting to changes. …

Cisco’s Outshift Incubator Sends Agentic AI Protocol To The Linux Foundation was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Linux packet sampling using eBPF

Linux 6.11+ kernels provide TCX attachment points for eBPF programs to efficiently examine packets as they ingress and egress the host. The latest version of the open source Host sFlow agent includes support for TCX packet sampling to stream industry standard sFlow telemetry to a central collector for network wide visibility, e.g. Deploy real-time network dashboards using Docker compose describes how to quickly set up a Prometheus database and use Grafana to build network dashboards.

static __always_inline void sample_packet(struct __sk_buff *skb, __u8 direction) {
    __u32 key = skb->ifindex;
    __u32 *rate = bpf_map_lookup_elem(&sampling, &key);
    if (!rate || (*rate > 0 && bpf_get_prandom_u32() % *rate != 0))
        return;

    struct packet_event_t pkt = {};
    pkt.timestamp = bpf_ktime_get_ns();
    pkt.ifindex = skb->ifindex;
    pkt.sampling_rate = *rate;
    pkt.ingress_ifindex = skb->ingress_ifindex;
    pkt.routed_ifindex = direction ? 0 : get_route(skb);
    pkt.pkt_len = skb->len;
    pkt.direction = direction;

    __u32 hdr_len = skb->len < MAX_PKT_HDR_LEN ? skb->len : MAX_PKT_HDR_LEN;
    if (hdr_len > 0 && bpf_skb_load_bytes(skb, 0, pkt.hdr, hdr_len) < 0)
        return;
    bpf_perf_event_output(skb, &events, BPF_F_CURRENT_CPU, &pkt, sizeof(pkt));
}

SEC("tcx/ingress")
int tcx_ingress(struct __sk_buff *skb) {
    sample_packet(skb, 0);

    return TCX_NEXT;
}

SEC("tcx/egress")
int tcx_egress(struct __sk_buff *skb) {
    sample_packet(skb, 1);

    return TCX_NEXT;
}

The sample.bpf.c file Continue reading

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