TAYGA: Bridge an IPv6 Network Back to IPv4 using NAT64

Every network admin on the planet knows this dirty little secret: We’re running out of IPv4 addresses. This was an inevitability, given how wide-spread the network and network devices have become. Even on your LAN, you sometimes have to use subnetting, simply because you’ve found the devices on your massive enterprise network have gobbled up all the 192.68.1.x addresses. It’s a problem. Which is why IPv6 was developed. IPv6 offers a larger pool of addresses from which to use. The problem is that IPv6 isn’t nearly as easy to employ as IPv4. After all, 192.168.1.1 is much easier to remember than 0:0:0:0:0:ffff:c0a8:101. But what’s a network administrator to do? Migrate all of those servers and various hardware devices from IPv4 to IPv6? In theory, yes, that is exactly what should happen. However, that’s not nearly as easy as one would like to think it would be. After all, you might have hundreds upon hundreds of devices and numerous locations. On top of which, there’s always that pesky DNS that must be updated (which could equate to downtime). Oh, and let’s not forget that IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4. Why was this decision Continue reading

Cisco turns out security patches 25 high-threat flaws for IOS, IOS XE

If you are a security admin with lots of systems running Cisco IOS and IOS XE software today is decidedly not your day.Cisco this week posted 25 “High” rated security advisories that stem from 34 vulnerabilities the company suggests should be fixed as soon as possible. The vulnerabilities impact a wide-range of Cisco gear as IOS and IOS XE are the company’s most widely used operating systems. The warnings affect firewalls, wireless access points and switches.Network pros react to new Cisco certification curriculum For example, one of the highest rated threats--with an 8.6 out of 10 threat level, are multiple vulnerabilities in the Zone-Based Firewall feature of Cisco IOS XE Software that could let an remote attacker to cause the device to reload or stop forwarding traffic through the firewall,resulting in a denial of service (DoS).To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco turns out security patches 25 high-threat flaws for IOS, IOS XE

If you are a security admin with lots of systems running Cisco IOS and IOS XE software today is decidedly not your day.Cisco this week posted 25 “High” rated security advisories that stem from 34 vulnerabilities the company suggests should be fixed as soon as possible. The vulnerabilities impact a wide-range of Cisco gear as IOS and IOS XE are the company’s most widely used operating systems. The warnings affect firewalls, wireless access points and switches.Network pros react to new Cisco certification curriculum For example, one of the highest rated threats--with an 8.6 out of 10 threat level, are multiple vulnerabilities in the Zone-Based Firewall feature of Cisco IOS XE Software that could let an remote attacker to cause the device to reload or stop forwarding traffic through the firewall,resulting in a denial of service (DoS).To read this article in full, please click here

MemVerge ships software-defined persistent memory software

Big Memory software startup MemVerge launched its Memory Machine software designed to turn DRAM and Intel Optane persistent memory into a software-defined memory pool, bringing DRAM performance to persistent memory (PMEM).For some use cases, SSDs just aren’t fast enough. “Despite all the great advances in storage, the latency difference between memory and storage remains at more than three orders of magnitude, making this data movement inefficient,” said Alper Ilkbahar, vice president and general manager of the memory and storage product group at Intel in a conference call with MemVerge.To read this article in full, please click here

MemVerge ships software-defined persistent memory software

Big Memory software startup MemVerge launched its Memory Machine software designed to turn DRAM and Intel Optane persistent memory into a software-defined memory pool, bringing DRAM performance to persistent memory (PMEM).For some use cases, SSDs just aren’t fast enough. “Despite all the great advances in storage, the latency difference between memory and storage remains at more than three orders of magnitude, making this data movement inefficient,” said Alper Ilkbahar, vice president and general manager of the memory and storage product group at Intel in a conference call with MemVerge.To read this article in full, please click here

The Smörgåsbord

No plan, no script, no net. In this episode Tony and Jordan give a peek behind the curtains on what has been going on with them both personally and professionally. This episode has a bit of everything. Personal struggles, new hobbies, work news, and a Defcon capture the flag story. This is the Smörgåsbord.

 

Network Collective thanks NVIDIA for sponsoring today’s episode. NVIDIA is positioned as the leader in open networking and provides end-to-end solutions at all layers of the software and hardware stack. You can experience NVIDIA Cumulus in the Cloud for free!  Head on over to:

https://cumulusnetworks.com/ncpod

to see what a modern open network operating system looks like for yourself.
Tony Efantis
Host
Jordan Martin
Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post The Smörgåsbord appeared first on Network Collective.

Video: Bridging, Routing, Switching

If you’re working solely with IP-based networks, you’re probably quick to assume that hop-by-hop destination-only forwarding is the only packet forwarding paradigm that makes sense. Not true, even today’s networks use a variety of forwarding mechanisms, most of them called some variant of routing or switching.

What exactly is the difference between the two, and what is bridging? I’m answering these questions (and a few others like what’s the difference between data-, control- and management planes) in the Bridging, Routing and Switching Terminology video.

Watch the video
The video is part of How Networks Really Work webinar and available with Free ipSpace.net Subscription.

Scaling the Root of the DNS

The DNS is a remarkably simple system. You send it queries and you get back answers. Simple. However, the DNS is simple in the same way that Chess or Go are simple. They are all constrained environments governed by a small set of rigid rules, but they all possess astonishing complexity.

Static Analysis of Java Enterprise Applications: Frameworks and Caches, the Elephants in the Room

Static analysis of Java enterprise applications: frameworks and caches, the elephants in the room, Antoniadis et al., PLDI’20

Static analysis is a key component of many quality and security analysis tools. Being static, it has the advantage that analysis results can be produced solely from source code without the need to execute the program. This means for example that it can be applied to analyse source code repositories and pull requests, be used as an additional test in CI pipelines, and even give assistance in your IDE if it’s fast enough.

Enterprise applications have (more than?) their fair share of quality and security issues, and execute in a commercial context where those come with financial and/or reputational risk. So they would definitely benefit from the kinds of reassurances that static analysis can bring. But there’s a problem:

Enterprise applications represent a major failure of applying programming languages research to the real world — a black eye of the research community. Essentially none of the published algorithms or successful research frameworks for program analysis achieve acceptable results for enterprise applications on the main quality axes of static analysis research: completeness, precision, and scalability.

If you try running Continue reading

A Year Later: Reflections on the ANZ Security Landscape

A Year Later: Reflections on the ANZ Security Landscape
A Year Later: Reflections on the ANZ Security Landscape

It’s been one year since I joined Cloudflare as Head of Australia and New Zealand. While it has been a great year for our ANZ operations, it is hard to stop thinking about the elephant in the room, especially as I’m writing this blog from my home in the middle of Melbourne’s lockdown.

The pandemic has not only disrupted our daily lives, but has also caused a massive shift to remote work for many of us. As a result, security teams lost visibility into office network traffic, their employees moved to unsupervised WiFi networks with new video conferencing technology, and their IT teams found that their out-dated VPN platforms could not handle all the traffic of remote employees. While many organisations were already moving to cloud-based applications, this year has exacerbated the need for greater security posture. Our team has been even more humbled by our mission to help build a better Internet and help organisations face the increased security threats COVID-19 has triggered. With that in mind, I’d like to take a look back at the milestones of the past year.

First, I’d like to recognise how strong and resilient our people have been in the past year. It Continue reading

What is a virtual machine, and why are they so useful?

Many of today’s cutting-edge technologies such as cloud computing, edge computing and microservices, owe their start to the concept of the virtual machine—separating operating systems and software instances from the underlying physical computer.What is a virtual machine? A virtual machine (VM) is software that runs programs or applications without being tied to a physical machine. In a VM instance, one or more guest machines can run on a host computer.To read this article in full, please click here

What is a virtual machine, and why are they so useful?

Many of today’s cutting-edge technologies such as cloud computing, edge computing and microservices, owe their start to the concept of the virtual machine—separating operating systems and software instances from the underlying physical computer.What is a virtual machine? A virtual machine (VM) is software that runs programs or applications without being tied to a physical machine. In a VM instance, one or more guest machines can run on a host computer.To read this article in full, please click here

Challenge Labs added to NVIDIA Cumulus in the Cloud

There are many aspects to developing the skills to be an effective network engineer and this skill set falls into a few different categories. Logically the first step to conquer is understanding the various networking technologies and protocols. This requires a more traditional form of learning— studying protocols through specs or RFCs, reading whitepapers etc. The next step is implementing this knowledge through configuring network devices. Learning this skill is more like trying to learn a different language. The BGP protocol itself adheres to a set of standards, but each network device might present the configuration of BGP in a different way. The final, and possibly most difficult skill to acquire is a combination of the first two: troubleshooting.

Effectively troubleshooting requires not just a solid foundational knowledge about the technology and how it works, but also the need to understand how to configure and validate that configuration on the network devices. The foundational knowledge permeates through the various implementations regardless of vendor, but configuration and validation vary drastically from one to the next. This leads to perhaps the most difficult aspect of troubleshooting. It’s not just enough to understand how a technology works, but you must also understand a Continue reading

Docker Open Sources Compose for Amazon ECS and Microsoft ACI

Today we are open sourcing the code for the Amazon ECS and Microsoft ACI Compose integrations. This is the first time that Docker has made Compose available for the cloud, allowing developers to take their Compose projects they were running locally and deploy them to the cloud by simply switching context.

With Docker focusing on developers, we’ve been doubling down on the parts of Docker that developers love, like Desktop, Hub, and of course Compose. Millions of developers all over the world use Compose to develop their applications and love its simplicity but there was no simple way to get these applications running in the cloud.

Docker is working to make it easier to get code running in the cloud in two ways. First we moved the Compose specification into a community project. This will allow Compose to evolve with the community so that it may better solve more user needs and ensure that it is agnostic of runtime platform. Second, we’ve been working with Amazon and Microsoft on CLI integrations for Amazon ECS and Microsoft ACI that allow you to use docker compose up to deploy Compose applications directly to the cloud.

While implementing these integrations, we wanted to Continue reading

VMware Transit Connect – Simplifying Networking for VMC

The release of VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) 1.12 brings a number of exciting new capabilities to the managed service offering. A comprehensive list can be reviewed in the release notes. A key feature that is now Generally Available (GA) in all VMC commercial regions worldwide is VMware Transit ConnectTM. VMware Transit Connect enables customers to build high-speed, resilient connections between their VMware Cloud on AWS Software Defined Data Centers (SDDCs) and other resources. This capability is enabled by a feature called SDDC Groups that helps customers to logically organize SDDCs together to simplify management.

The SDDC Group construct empowers customers to quickly and easily define a collection of SDDCs, Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) or on-premises connectivity that need to interconnect. Additionally, the SDDC Group construct provides value inside the individual SDDCs by simplifying security policy as will be shown later in this post. Behind the simplification that SDDC Groups provide is the instantiation of an VMware Managed AWS Transit Gateway, a VTGW. The VTGW is a managed service from VMware and provides the underlying connectivity between the different resources.

The initial Transit Connect service provides three primary connectivity models:

Building even faster interpreters in Rust

Building even faster interpreters in Rust
Building even faster interpreters in Rust

At Cloudflare, we’re constantly working on improving the performance of our edge — and that was exactly what my internship this summer entailed. I’m excited to share some improvements we’ve made to our popular Firewall Rules product over the past few months.

Firewall Rules lets customers filter the traffic hitting their site. It’s built using our engine, Wirefilter, which takes powerful boolean expressions written by customers and matches incoming requests against them. Customers can then choose how to respond to traffic which matches these rules. We will discuss some in-depth optimizations we have recently made to Wirefilter, so you may wish to get familiar with how it works if you haven’t already.

Minimizing CPU usage

As a new member of the Firewall team, I quickly learned that performance is important — even in our security products. We look for opportunities to make our customers’ Internet properties faster where it’s safe to do so, maximizing both security and performance.

Our engine is already heavily used, powering all of Firewall Rules. But we have bigger plans. More and more products like our Web Application Firewall (WAF) will be running behind our Wirefilter-based engine, and it will become responsible for eating up a Continue reading

Could human organs join networks?

The idea of integrating computer networks and the human body is driving research in a number of areas. Recently, two teams of researchers shared their respective projects, which explore how biological cells might become networked and how electronics could become directly integrated with human tissue.Both presentations were part of the American Chemical Society's (ACS) Fall 2020 Virtual Meeting & Expo.The first presentation, conducted by a team at the University of Maryland, is focused on communications networks that mimic electronic networks but are derived from biological cells. The second study, led out of University of Delaware, discusses the idea of interfacing hardware and human tissue.To read this article in full, please click here

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