Technology Short Take 133

Welcome to Technology Short Take #133! This time around, I have a collection of links featuring the new Raspberry Pi 400, some macOS security-related articles, information on AWS Nitro Enclaves and gVisor, and a few other topics. Enjoy!

Networking

Servers/Hardware

  • The Raspberry Pi 400 is a neat offering. See this post for more details.

Security

Virtual Patching with VMware NSX Distributed IDS/IPS

Patching: The Perennial Problem  

Cybersecurity consumes an ever-increasing amount of our time and budgets, yet gaps remain and are inevitably exploited by bad actors. One of the biggest gaps is unpatched vulnerabilities: a recent survey found that 60% of cyberattacks in 2019 were associated with vulnerabilities for which patches were availablei.   

Most companies have a patch schedule that is barely able to keep up with applying the most important patches to the most critical vulnerabilities. Yet new ones crop up all the time: approximately 15,000 new vulnerability are discovered every year, which translates to one every 30 minutes ii. They impact all types of workloads, from multiple vendors, as well as open source projects.  

It’s a constant race to try to find and fix the most dangerous vulnerabilities before the bad actors can exploit them. But ignoring them is not an option.  

The Simplest Approach is Not So Simple  

Why not just patch everything or fix flaws in the code? Because it’s operationally challenging – and almost impossible.  

First, patching is an expensive and largely manual process. Second, applications may rely Continue reading

Fall 2020 RPKI Update

Fall 2020 RPKI Update

The Internet is a network of networks. In order to find the path between two points and exchange data, the network devices rely on the information from their peers. This information consists of IP addresses and Autonomous Systems (AS) which announce the addresses using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

One problem arises from this design: what protects against a malevolent peer who decides to announce incorrect information? The damage caused by route hijacks can be major.

Routing Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is a framework created in 2008. Its goal is to provide a source of truth for Internet Resources (IP addresses) and ASes in signed cryptographically signed records called Route Origin Objects (ROA).

Recently, we’ve seen the significant threshold of two hundred thousands of ROAs being passed. This represents a big step in making the Internet more secure against accidental and deliberate BGP tampering.

We have talked about RPKI in the past but we thought it would be a good time for an update.

In a more technical context, the RPKI framework consists of two parts:

  • IP addresses need to be cryptographically signed by their owners in a database managed by a Trust Anchor: Afrinic, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE. Those Continue reading

Compose CLI ACI Integration Now Available

Today we are pleased to announce that we have reached a major milestone, reaching GA and our V1 of both the Compose CLI and the ACI integration. ?

In May we announced the partnership between Docker and Microsoft to make it easier to deploy containerized applications from the Desktop to the cloud with Azure Container Instances (ACI). We are happy to let you know that all users of Docker Desktop now have the ACI experience available to them by default, allowing them to easily use existing Docker commands to deploy and manage containers running in ACI. 

As part of this I want to also call out a thank you to the MSFT team who have worked with us to make this all happen! That is a big thank you to Mike Morton, Karol Zadora-Przylecki, Brandon Waterloo, MacKenzie Olson, and Paul Yuknewicz.

Getting started with Docker and ACI 

As a new starter, to get going all you will need to do is upgrade your existing Docker Desktop to the latest stable version (2.5.0.0 or later), store your image on Docker Hub so you can deploy it (you can get started with Hub here) and then lastly you Continue reading

Switching Back Into A Higher Gear

If you want to get a sense of what is happening in the high-end of the Ethernet switch and routing market, it is Arista Networks, formerly an upstart and now just one of the bigger vendors taking on the hegemony of Cisco Systems in networking in the datacenter and now on the campus and at the edge, is probably the best bellwether there is. …

Switching Back Into A Higher Gear was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Changes to Our Work in 2021

Here at the Internet Society, we believe that the Internet is for everyone. Our work focuses on ensuring that the Internet remains open, globally-connected, trustworthy, and secure.

In 2020, we saw the world change in ways that no one could have anticipated.  Because of this, like so many other organizations, we had to assess our current and future plans and evaluate the resources available to us. As a result, we have made some changes to our activities for the upcoming year.

Moving into 2021, we will reduce activities related to our Open Standards Everywhere (OSE) and Time Security projects.

We still deeply believe that open Internet standards and securing the Internet’s time synchronization infrastructure are critical components for building an open and trustworthy Internet. So, while OSE and Time Security will no longer be standalone projects next year, we will continue to promote and defend these concepts through our other projects, initiatives, and activities.

Our work in 2020 in both these areas has had a measurable impact and many successes, which we will document in the 2020 Impact Report that will be published in early 2021. We will continue to finish work in progress on Time Security and OSE Continue reading

Defeat Emotet Attacks with Behavior-Based Malware Protection

The security community has enjoyed a few months of silence from Emotet, an advanced and evasive malware threat, since February of this year. But the silence was broken in July as the VMware Threat Analysis Unit (TAU) observed a major new Emotet campaign and, since then, fresh attacks have continued to surface. What caught the attention of VMware TAU is that the security community still lacks the capacity to effectively detect and prevent Emotet, even though it first appeared in 2014. As an example of this, Figure 1 shows the detection status on VirusTotal for one of the weaponized documents from a recent Emotet attack. Only about 25% of antivirus engines blocked the file, even though the key techniques — such as a base64-encoded PowerShell script used to download the Emotet payload from one of five URLs — are nothing new. (These results were checked five days after they were first submitted to VirusTotal.)

Figure 1: Detection of an Emotet-related document on VirusTotal

In this blog post, we’ll investigate the first stage of the recent Emotet attacks by analyzing one of the samples from the recent campaign to reveal the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used. This will help Continue reading

ClickHouse Capacity Estimation Framework

ClickHouse Capacity Estimation Framework

We use ClickHouse widely at Cloudflare. It helps us with our internal analytics workload, bot management, customer dashboards, and many other systems. For instance, before Bot Management can analyze and classify our traffic, we need to collect logs. The Firewall Analytics tool needs to store and query data somewhere too. The same goes for our new Cloudflare Radar project. We are using ClickHouse for this purpose. It is a big database that can store huge amounts of data and return it on demand. This is not the first time we have talked about ClickHouse, there is a dedicated blogpost on how we introduced ClickHouse for HTTP analytics.

Our biggest cluster has more than 100 nodes, another one about half that number. Besides that, we have over 20 clusters that have at least three nodes and the replication factor of three. Our current insertion rate is about 90M rows per second.

We use the standard approach in ClickHouse schema design. At the top level we have clusters, which hold shards, a group of nodes, and a node is a physical machine. You can find technical characteristics of the nodes here. Stored data is replicated between clusters. Different shards hold different parts Continue reading

Ansible 2.10 introduction

Hello my friend,

as you know, Ansible is one of the leading tools for the automation of the IT and network infrastructure. We have written a lot about it earlier (e.g. CLI configs, OpenConfig with NETCONF, or VNF-M). Recently Red Hat announced the new version of Ansible (Ansible 2.10), which changes a lot the way we used to work with that. 



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Eager to learn about network automation?

We are here to help you. At our network automation training you learn all you need to know to be successful with such tasks in your profession:

  • Linux, Docker, KVM
  • YANG models
  • JSON, XML, Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) data formats
  • SSH, REST API, gRPC transport
  • gNMI, NETCONF, RESTCONF protocols
  • How to use and manage everything above with Ansible, Bash, and Python

Start your automation training today.

What that is about

Ansible 2.10 is more than a just another Ansible’s update. It is a new approach, paradigm shift, Continue reading

Renumbering Public Cloud Address Space

Got this question from one of the networking engineers “blessed” with rampant clueless-rush-to-the-cloud.

I plan to peer multiple VNet from different regions. The problem is that there is not any consistent deployment in regards to the private IP subnets used on each VNet to the point I found several of them using public IP blocks as private IP ranges. As far as I recall, in Azure we can’t re-ip the VNets as the resource will be deleted so I don’t see any other option than use NAT from offending VNet subnets to use my internal RFC1918 IPv4 range. Do you have a better idea?

The way I understand Azure, while you COULD have any address range configured as VNet CIDR block, you MUST have non-overlapping address ranges for VNet peering.

Read more …

Renumbering Public Cloud Address Space

Got this question from one of the networking engineers “blessed” with rampant clueless-rush-to-the-cloud.

I plan to peer multiple VNet from different regions. The problem is that there is not any consistent deployment in regards to the private IP subnets used on each VNet to the point I found several of them using public IP blocks as private IP ranges. As far as I recall, in Azure we can’t re-ip the VNets as the resource will be deleted so I don’t see any other option than use NAT from offending VNet subnets to use my internal RFC1918 IPv4 range. Do you have a better idea?

The way I understand Azure, while you COULD have any address range configured as VNet CIDR block, you MUST have non-overlapping address ranges for VNet peering.

Read more …

Day Two Cloud 073: AnsibleFest & HashiConf 2020 Announcements, Analysis & Awesomeness

Ned Bellavance and Ethan Banks analyze the big announcements from two conferences the clouderati should care about: AnsibleFest and HashiConf Digital. Both of these were virtual events because there's still an pandemic on, folks. Speaking of which, how do Ned and Ethan feel about virtual events? Not great, really. Slidewhipping the attendees in multi-day webinars seems to be how vendors are running their virtual conferences, and it ain't workin'...

Day Two Cloud 073: AnsibleFest & HashiConf 2020 Announcements, Analysis & Awesomeness

Ned Bellavance and Ethan Banks analyze the big announcements from two conferences the clouderati should care about: AnsibleFest and HashiConf Digital. Both of these were virtual events because there's still an pandemic on, folks. Speaking of which, how do Ned and Ethan feel about virtual events? Not great, really. Slidewhipping the attendees in multi-day webinars seems to be how vendors are running their virtual conferences, and it ain't workin'...

The post Day Two Cloud 073: AnsibleFest & HashiConf 2020 Announcements, Analysis & Awesomeness appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Sometimes HPC Means Big Memory, Not Big Compute

Not every HPC or analytics workload – meaning an algorithmic solver and the data that it chews on – fits nicely in a 128 GB or 256 GB or even a 512 GB memory space, and sometimes the dataset is quite large and runs best with a larger memory space rather than carving it up into smaller pieces and distributing across nodes with the same amount of raw compute. …

Sometimes HPC Means Big Memory, Not Big Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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