VMware is Not New to Enterprise Security

By: Keith Luck

None of us can stop thinking about how 2020 has changed the way we go about our daily tasks. Going to school, going to the store, going out to eat — going anywhere at all. But now, for the first time, we are not even going to work! Everyone has been pushed to work from home. This change has a wide-ranging set of variables that need to be addressed, from the business limits on resources for connectivity to the employee’s limits on remote resources of space, privacy, and uninterrupted concentration. 

The overnight reliance on remote, personal, shared services for connectivity from the worker to the corporation has forever put an end to the idea of a security perimeter. Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) has moved from being an academic discussion to a persistent customer requests for solutions. This shift is furthered by the timely release of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology’s NIST Special Publication 800-207 ZTA Guide. At the same time, we now see numerous security industry vendors claiming their products will provide Zero Trust. 

Naturally, many VMware customers want Continue reading

War Stories – The Trilogy

From working in unbelievable environments to dealing with unexpected bugs, the longer that you do networking for a career the more likely it is that you have a story or two from the trenches to share. Listening to other’s adventures can serve both as a cathartic release and as a warning for roads to leave untraveled. In today’s episode we talk with some experienced engineers about their stories. If nothing else, you as the listener can have some laughs at our expense. Enjoy!

 

Thank you to Bluecat Networks for sponsoring today’s episode. Bluecat is putting together some great content and a great community surrounding the topics of DNS, DHCP, and IPAM. You can join the Network VIP community and register for the next roundtable by going to bluecatnetworks.com/certainty.
Thank you to Unimus for sponsoring today’s episode. Unimus is a fast to deploy and easy to use Network Automation and Configuration Management solution. You can learn more about how you can start automating your network in under 15 minutes at unimus.net/nc.
Amy Arnold
Guest
Chris Cummings
Guest
Tony Efantis
Host
Jordan Martin
Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3. Continue reading

Technology Short Take 134

Welcome to Technology Short Take #134! I’m publishing a bit early this time due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the US. So, for all my US readers, here’s some content to peruse while enjoying some turkey (or whatever you’re having this year). For my international readers, here’s some content to peruse while enjoying dramatically lower volumes of e-mail because the US is on holiday. See, something for everyone!

Networking

Security

  • I’m glad to see this. Open source has become so critical to so many aspects of our computing infrastructure.
  • OpenCSPM looks like it could be quite a useful tool. I haven’t yet had time to dig in and get familiar with the details, but what I have seen so far looks good.
  • Uh oh…more hardware exploits.
  • The macOS OCSP fiasco generated quite a bit of attention and analysis (see here and here).

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

Moving Quicksilver into production

Moving Quicksilver into production

One of the great arts of software engineering is making updates and improvements to working systems without taking them offline. For some systems this can be rather easy, spin up a new web server or load balancer, redirect traffic and you’re done. For other systems, such as the core distributed data store which keeps millions of websites online, it’s a bit more of a challenge.

Quicksilver is the data store responsible for storing and distributing the billions of KV pairs used to configure the millions of sites and Internet services which use Cloudflare. In a previous post, we discussed why it was built and what it was replacing. Building it, however, was only a small part of the challenge. We needed to deploy it to production into a network which was designed to be fault tolerant and in which downtime was unacceptable.

We needed a way to deploy our new service seamlessly, and to roll back that deploy should something go wrong. Ultimately many, many, things did go wrong, and every bit of failure tolerance put into the system proved to be worth its weight in gold because none of this was visible to customers.

The Bridge

Our goal Continue reading

Measuring Internet Resilience in Africa

For many in the African region, Internet interruptions or service degradations occur frequently, which results in a disjointed Internet experience. In order to help improve this experience, we need to track and measure various Internet characteristics through network telemetry. This data can help to identify infrastructure and traffic issues and can provide key information to help decision makers decide where infrastructure investment and policy change might need to be made.

However, as shown by a survey carried out by AFRINIC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for Africa, in 2019, Internet measurement is not a common practice in the African region. This is largely due to a scarcity of deployed measurement tools, platforms and equipment, a lack of awareness in the subject, and the lack of relevant skills to carry out the measurement tasks. The shortage of measurement equipment in African countries makes it very challenging to accurately determine the problem areas that need to be addressed in order to improve Internet reliability and resilience in Africa.

Collaborative Measurements 

Assessing the resilience of the Internet is a key component of the Internet Society’s work on Measuring the Internet. To help identify the causes of Internet interruptions and service degradations, we Continue reading

Growing Beyond Networking Skills

One of my subscribers trying to figure out how to improve his career choices sent me this question:

I am Sr. Network Engineer with 12+ Years’ experience. I was quit happy with my networking skills but will all the recent changes I’m confused. I am not able to understand what are the key skills I should learn as a network engineer to keep myself demandable.

Before reading the rest of this blog post, please read Cloud and the Three IT Geographies by Massimo Re Ferre.

Read more …

Growing Beyond Networking Skills

One of my subscribers trying to figure out how to improve his career choices sent me this question:

I am Sr. Network Engineer with 12+ Years’ experience. I was quit happy with my networking skills but will all the recent changes I’m confused. I am not able to understand what are the key skills I should learn as a network engineer to keep myself demandable.

Before reading the rest of this blog post, please read Cloud and the Three IT Geographies by Massimo Re Ferre.

Read more …

BPF: The future of configs

BPF has some wow-presentations, showing how it enables new performance measuring and tracing. Brendan Gregg has a whole bunch, for example. But I don’t think’s it’s very well explained just why BPF is such a big deal.

Most of the demos are essentially cool and useful looking tools, with an “oh by the way BPF made this happen”. Similar to how it’s common to see announcements about some software, where the very title of the announcement ends with “written in Go”. It gives a vibe of “so what?”.

If you’re interested in system tooling and configuration, and aren’t already aware of BPF, then this is for you.

I’m not an expert on BPF, but this will hopefully help someone else bootstrap faster.

bpftrace

bpftrace is really cool. Clearly it’s inspired by dtrace. But one should not mistake bpftrace for BPF. bpftrace is only yet another tool that uses BPF, albeit one that allows you to create trace points in a domain specific language.

This is not the full power of BPF. It’s not at all the big picture.

BPF and configs

Let’s take packet filtering as an example. Once upon a time in Linux there was ipfwadm. I Continue reading

Facts about backup security that should scare you to death

Least privilege—the idea that each person in your organization should have the least number of privileges they need in order to accomplish a given task—is an important security concept that needs to be implemented in your backup system.The challenge here is that network, system, and backup admins all wield an incredible amount of power. If one of them makes a mistake, or worse, intentionally tries to do the company harm, limiting the amount of power they have reduces the amount of damage they can inflict.For example, you might give one network administrator the ability to monitor networks, and another one the ability to create and/or reconfigure networks. Security admins might be responsible for creating and maintaining network-administration users without getting any of those privileges themselves.To read this article in full, please click here

Facts about backup security that should scare you to death

Least privilege—the idea that each person in your organization should have the least number of privileges they need in order to accomplish a given task—is an important security concept that needs to be implemented in your backup system.The challenge here is that network, system, and backup admins all wield an incredible amount of power. If one of them makes a mistake, or worse, intentionally tries to do the company harm, limiting the amount of power they have reduces the amount of damage they can inflict.For example, you might give one network administrator the ability to monitor networks, and another one the ability to create and/or reconfigure networks. Security admins might be responsible for creating and maintaining network-administration users without getting any of those privileges themselves.To read this article in full, please click here

Pure Expands Its As-A-Service Playbook

The push by established datacenter tech vendors to get into the as-a-service game has accelerated in recent months, fueled in part by the COVID-19 pandemic and the need by organizations to more quickly embrace cloud services to help them adapt to the suddenly shifted business model that features a more widely distributed workforce, which brings a truckload of security and management issues. …

Pure Expands Its As-A-Service Playbook was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

IETF 109

The latest IETF meeting was held in mid-November. Here I’m going to pick just one presentation from each of a small collection of the week’s working group meetings and explore that topic in a little more detail.

The History of EARN, RARE, and European Networks (part 1)

European networks from the mid-1980’s to the late 2000’s underwent a lot of change, bolstered by the rise and fall of America Online, the laying of a lot of subsea cables, and the creation of several organizations, including EARN and RARE, to bolster the spread and use of the Internet. Daniele Bovio joins Donald Sharp and Russ White on this episode of the History of Networking to give us a good overall perspective of this history.

You can find more information about the history of EARN at https://earn-history.net.

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