APIs are the lifeblood of modern Internet-connected applications. Every millisecond they carry requests from mobile applications—place this food delivery order, “like” this picture—and directions to IoT devices—unlock the car door, start the wash cycle, my human just finished a 5k run—among countless other calls.
They’re also the target of widespread attacks designed to perform unauthorized actions or exfiltrate data, as data from Gartner increasingly shows: “by 2021, 90% of web-enabled applications will have more surface area for attack in the form of exposed APIs rather than the UI, up from 40% in 2019, and “Gartner predicted that, by 2022, API abuses will move from an infrequent to the most-frequent attack vector, resulting in data breaches for enterprise web applications”[1][2]. Of the 18 million requests per second that traverse Cloudflare’s network, 50% are directed towards APIs—with the majority of these requests blocked as malicious.
To combat these threats, Cloudflare is making it simple to secure APIs through the use of strong client certificate-based identity and strict schema-based validation. As of today, these capabilities are available free for all plans within our new “API Shield” offering. And as of today, the security benefits also extend to gRPC-based APIs, which use binary Continue reading
Today we're excited to announce beta support for proxying gRPC, a next-generation protocol that allows you to build APIs at scale. With gRPC on Cloudflare, you get access to the security, reliability and performance features that you're used to having at your fingertips for traditional APIs. Sign up for the beta today in the Network tab of the Cloudflare dashboard.
gRPC has proven itself to be a popular new protocol for building APIs at scale: it’s more efficient and built to offer superior bi-directional streaming capabilities. However, because gRPC uses newer technology, like HTTP/2, under the covers, existing security and performance tools did not support gRPC traffic out of the box. This meant that customers adopting gRPC to power their APIs had to pick between modernity on one hand, and things like security, performance, and reliability on the other. Because supporting modern protocols and making sure people can operate them safely and performantly is in our DNA, we set out to fix this.
When you put your gRPC APIs on Cloudflare, you immediately gain all the benefits that come with Cloudflare. Apprehensive of exposing your APIs to bad actors? Add security features such as WAF and Bot Management. Need Continue reading
Now that I've startled you, no, the network CLI isn’t going away anytime soon, nor are people going to start manipulating XML directly for their network configuration data. What I do want to help you understand is how Ansible can now be used as an interface into automating the pushing and pulling of configuration data (via NETCONF) in a structured means (via YANG data models) without having to truly learn about either of these complex concepts. All you have to understand is how to use the Ansible Content Collection as shown below, obfuscating all technical implementation details that have burdened network operators and engineers for years.
Before we even start talking about NETCONF and YANG, our overall goal is for the network to leverage configuration data in a structured manner. This makes network automation much more predictable and reliable when ensuring operation state. NETCONF and YANG are the low-level pieces of the puzzle, but we are making it easier to do via well known Ansible means and methodologies.
What we believe as Ansible developers is that NETCONF and YANG aren't (and shouldn't) be quintessential or ultimate goals for network automation engineers. You should not need to Continue reading
Contrary to what some evangelists would love you to believe, getting fluent in network automation is a bit harder than watching 3-minute videos and cobbling playbooks together with google-and-paste… but then nothing really worth doing is ever easy, or everyone else would be doing it already.
Here’s a typical comment from a Building Network Automation Solutions attendee:
I’m loving the class. I feel more confused than I ever have in my 23 year career… but I can already see the difference in my perspective shift in all aspects of my work.
Contrary to what some evangelists would love you to believe, getting fluent in network automation is a bit harder than watching 3-minute videos and cobbling playbooks together with google-and-paste… but then nothing really worth doing is ever easy, or everyone else would be doing it already.
Here’s a typical comment from a Building Network Automation Solutions attendee:
I’m loving the class. I feel more confused than I ever have in my 23 year career… but I can already see the difference in my perspective shift in all aspects of my work.
When you come to the crossroads and make a big decision about selling your soul to the devil to get what you want, it is supposed to be a dramatic event, the stuff that legends are made of. …
With “Crossroads” Supercomputer, HPE Notches Another DOE Win was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Kubernetes has become the world’s most popular container orchestration system and is taking the enterprise ecosystem by storm. At this disruptive moment it’s useful to look back and review the security threats that have evolved in this dynamic landscape. Identifying these threats and exploits and being a proactive learner may save you a lot of time and effort…as well as help you retain your reputation in the long run. In this blog we’ll look at some critical security issues faced by the Kubernetes ecosystem in the recent past, and examine the top tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) used by attackers.
Everyday, new Kubernetes ecosystem Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) are published. Let’s take a closer look at some of the cloud shakers…
CVE-2020-14386: Using privilege escalation vulnerability to escape the pod
A flaw was found in the Linux kernel before 5.9-rc4. Memory corruption can be exploited to gain root privileges from unprivileged processes.
We received notification that some instances in our cloud infrastructure are vulnerable to this CVE. When we took a closer look, it appeared to be a typical privilege escalation vulnerability using AF sockets on hosts. Unprivileged users with CAP_NET_RAW permissions can send packets Continue reading
People in the modern era sometimes forget that networking predates the rise of Cisco Systems and the commercialization of the Internet. …
It’s Back To The Future For Omni-Path InfiniBand was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
As you migrate and expand your deployments on VMware Cloud on AWS, your network connectivity provides the foundational infrastructure for all workloads in your SDDCs. When you then scale across multiple SDDCs — which also need to network with several data centers and tens or even hundreds of VPCs — scaling network connectivity becomes a critical challenge.
In this context, we’re excited to announce a number of new networking and security capabilities on VMware Cloud on AWS.
Together, these new features enable seamless connectivity to your SDDCs from on-prem data centers and AWS VPCs while unlocking the capacity you need to efficiently drive your workloads in the cloud.
Let’s take a closer look at each one.
SDDC Groups
SDDC Groups enable customers to manage multiple SDDCs as a single logical entity. This simplifies operations while maintaining the flexibility that customers rely on. SDDCs in a Group can be interconnected with VMware Transit Connect, and Continue reading
Are you interested in finding out more about Network Time Protocol (NTP), Network Time Security (NTS), and discovering why synchronized time is an essential foundation for online security?
Today is International Podcast Day, so why not spend it listening to the The Hedge Podcast #49: Karen O’Donoghue and Network Time Security.
Network Time Protocol (NTP) is one of the oldest Internet protocols in use. It enables the synchronization of clocks on computer networks to within a few milliseconds of standard universal coordinated time (UTC). Accurate time is also a critical component for online security, and many security mechanisms, such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) and digital signature creation and verification, depend on accurate timekeeping.
Updated Mechanism
NTP’s security mechanisms, however, were designed back in an era when the risk of attack was unlikely. Due to the continued expansion of the Internet, these mechanisms have become outdated. Work has been underway for many years in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Network Time Protocol Working Group to develop replacement technology, which will help to secure the Internet’s time synchronization infrastructure well into the future. The result of this work is in the Continue reading
AI in networks is a hotly contested subject—so we asked Bob Friday, CTO of Mist Systems, to explain the value and future of AI in networks. Bob joins Tom Ammon and Russ White for this episode.
AI is too hard for most enterprises to adopt, just like HPC was and continues to be. …
VMware Embraces Nvidia GPUs, DPUs To Drive Enterprise AI was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
A meeting with Duan Lightfoot from Lab Everyday to discuss mid-career choices.
Today's show explores cloud visibility with sponsor Riverbed. Perhaps best known for its Steelhead WAN optimization appliances, Riverbed has a suite of solutions that target cloud performance and visibility, and we'll get to know them. Our Riverbed guests are Dr. Vincent Berk, VP, Chief Architect Security, CTO; and Brandon Carroll, Director, Technical Evangelist, Worldwide Marketing Management.
The post Day Two Cloud 068: Achieving Crucial Cloud Visibility With Riverbed (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.