Virtual consensus in Delos

Virtual consensus in Delos, Balakrishnan et al. (Facebook, Inc.), OSDI’2020

Before we dive into this paper, if you click on the link above and then download and open up the paper pdf you might notice the familiar red/orange splash of USENIX, and appreciate the fully open access. USENIX is a nonprofit organisation committed to making content and research freely available – both conference proceedings and the recorded presentations of their events. Without in-person conferences this year, income is down and events are under threat. If you want to help them, you have options to donate, become a member, or even talk to your organisation about becoming a partner, benefactor, or patron. Every little helps!

Back in 2017 the engineering team at Facebook had a problem. They needed a table store to power core control plane services, which meant strong guarantees on durability, consistency, and availability. They also needed it fast – the goal was to be in production within 6 to 9 months. While ultimately this new system should be able to take advantage of the latest advances in consensus for improved performance, that’s not realistic given a 6-9 month in-production target. So realistically all Continue reading

Resizing Windows to a Specific Size on macOS

I recently had a need (OK, maybe more a desire than a need) to set my browser window(s) on macOS to a specific size, like 1920x1080. I initially started looking at one of the many macOS window managers, but after reading lots of reviews and descriptions and still being unclear if any of these products did what I wanted, I decided to step back to using AppleScript to accomplish what I was seeking. In this post, I’ll share the solution (and the articles that helped me arrive at the solution).

My first stop was this blog post by Ethan Banks. I tried replicating the AppleScript he used, but couldn’t get it to work. I’m still running macOS 10.14 “Mojave,” so perhaps his code was specific to macOS 10.15 “Catalina.” I moved on, never realizing there was another section to his post that had the information I needed (and would eventually find). Let that be a lesson to be sure to read the entire post next time.

Moving on, I arrived at this post. OK, this used a different mechanism than Ethan’s post. I tried it, and it sort of worked, but it didn’t create the window geometry Continue reading

Jinja2 Tutorial – Part 6 – Include and Import

Welcome to another instalment in my Jinja2 Tutorial series. So far we've learned a lot about rendering, control structures and various functions. Here we'll start discussing language features that help us deal with organizing templates. First constructs we'll look at are include and import statements.

Jinja2 Tutorial series

Contents

Introduction

Include and Import statements are some of the tools that Jinja gives us to help with organizing collections of templates, especially once these grow in size.

By using these constructs we can split templates into smaller logical units, leading to files with well-defined scopes. This in turn will make it easier to Continue reading

Quick personal vpn – wireguard with aws

I have written about wire-guard previously about how easy it is to set-up a personal vpn

https://r2079.wordpress.com/2020/05/16/wireguard-server-and-qr-code-scan-in-the-mobile-app-its-that-simple-to-set-up-a-vpn/

What is the issue: I have never explained the use-case clearly in that post, let me try to re-attempt the write-up again

you see, on a personal basis I need to access few websites which are hosted in India, issue with these websites is that they dont allow any traffic external to the country

There are many browser based proxies out there which can do this task just fine and also paid services, my problem is that when you are exchanging user/password information and financial transactions over these proxies you don’t know how exactly all this data getting exchanged and transmitted

Few Tips from my experience before i get into the post :

-> you need to change ubuntu instances ipv4 forwarding so that it will forward packets through the instance also nats it 

root@ip-172-31-34-66:~# cat /etc/sysctl.conf | egrep -i ip_forward
net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
root@ip-172-31-34-66:~#

-> Make sure you dont start routing everything first, take public DNS’s and test the system with allowed_ips in the configuration file else you will loose internet access and if not done correctly you will Continue reading

Announcing Spectrum DDoS Analytics and DDoS Insights & Trends

Announcing Spectrum DDoS Analytics and DDoS Insights & Trends
Announcing Spectrum DDoS Analytics and DDoS Insights & Trends

We’re excited to announce the expansion of the Network Analytics dashboard to Spectrum customers on the Enterprise plan. Additionally, this announcement introduces two major dashboard improvements for easier reporting and investigation.

Network Analytics

Cloudflare's packet and bit oriented dashboard, Network Analytics, provides visibility into Internet traffic patterns and DDoS attacks in Layers 3 and 4 of the OSI model. This allows our users to better understand the traffic patterns and DDoS attacks as observed at the Cloudflare edge.

When the dashboard was first released in January, these capabilities were only available to Bring Your Own IP customers on the Spectrum and Magic Transit services, but now Spectrum customers using Cloudflare’s Anycast IPs are also supported.

Protecting L4 applications

Spectrum is Cloudflare’s L4 reverse-proxy service that offers unmetered DDoS protection and traffic acceleration for TCP and UDP applications. It provides enhanced traffic performance through faster TLS, optimized network routing, and high speed interconnection. It also provides encryption to legacy protocols and applications that don’t come with embedded encryption. Customers who typically use Spectrum operate services in which network performance and resilience to DDoS attacks are of utmost importance to their business, such as email, remote access, and gaming.

Spectrum customers Continue reading

Securing Your Work From Home

UnlockedDoor

Wanna make your security team’s blood run cold? Remind them that all that time and effort they put in to securing the enterprise from attackers and data exfiltration is currently sitting unused while we all work from home. You might have even heard them screaming at the sky just now.

Enterprise security isn’t easy, nor should it be. We constantly have to be on the offensive to find new attack vectors and hunt down threats and exploits. We have spent years and careers building defense-in-depth to an artform not unlike making buttery croissants. It’s all great when that apparatus is protecting our enterprise data center and cloud presence like a Scottish castle repelling invaders. Right now we’re in the wilderness with nothing but a tired sentry to protect us from the marauders.

During Security Field Day 4, I led a discussion panel with the delegates about the challenges of working from home securely. Here’s a link to our discussion that I wanted to spend some time elaborating on:

Home Is Where the Exploits Are

BYOD was a huge watershed moment for the enterprise because we realized for the first time that we had to learn to secure other people’s Continue reading

Weekend Reads 110620

These trends highlight the need for organizations to secure their cloud environments. Provided below are some things they should keep in mind along the way

This blog post aims to find out by first identifying the differences between IT and OT. It will then provide insight into IT-OT convergence and discuss challenges that this junction is creating. It will then discuss how containers can solve some of those challenges.

Companies relying on their business interruption or property insurance policies to cover ransomware attacks and other cyber damages are running the risk of not having coverage during a major attack if insurers are successful in shielding themselves using the ubiquitous “act of war” clause, according to cybersecurity and insurance experts.

A company’s business development tactics are usually about getting a bigger slice of the market “pie” for themselves through successful competition against other companies. However, the Internet and the services that run on it have repeatedly shown that, when companies collaborate with competitors to build and use open standards, the market pie is expanded and even a single slice provides a bigger return.

These days, due in no small part to the exhaustion of the IPv4 address pool, but equally due Continue reading

Member News: Internet in a Small Box

Net-á-porter: The South African Chapter of the Internet Society has been promoting an “Internet-in-a-box” initiative using an SD card to configure an inexpensive Raspberry Pi device. Interested people can configure an SD card or even order a pre-loaded SD card.

Taxing the ‘Net: The Mexico Chapter has gone on record as opposing a digital services tax proposed by the Mexican government. “If this initiative is approved, which would have a negative impact on free access to content and information by citizens, [and] we could find ourselves with a potential instrument of discrimination and censorship,” the Chapter said. The tax on foreign digital services would be 16 percent.

Moving governance forward: Pacific Islands Chapter member Swaran Ravindra noted that cybersecurity and digital inclusion were big topics at the recent Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum 2020. “Disruptive technologies … have enormous benefits for the Pacific region at large, but we cannot ignore the need for our people to be completely cognizant of the cybersecurity issues which we are being exposed to,” she wrote. “Fiji struggles with cyberbullying, suicide, mental health issues, fraud, and crime [that] technology may have been a part of, either intentionally or unintentionally. In order to leverage technology Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For November 6th, 2020

Hey, no power outages this week, so it's finally HighScalability time!

 

Stunning: Tycho Crater Region with Colours by Alain Paillou

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Without your support on Patreon this Stuff won't happen. 

 

Know someone who could benefit from becoming one with the cloud? I wrote Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 just for them. On Amazon it has 189 mostly 5 star reviews. Here's a 100% lactose-free review:

Number Stuff:

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge (which means this post has many more items to read so please keep on reading)...

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
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