The Hedge 84: David Brown and the Root of Trust
Many engineers just assume that secure hardware boot is, in fact, secure. How does this security work, and just how secure is it, though? David Brown joins Tom Ammon, Eyvonne Sharp, and Russ White on this episode of the Hedge to discuss the secure boot loader in some detail. For more information on the secure boot loader and IoT, see David’s presentation at the Open Source Summit.
The Effectiveness of AS Path Prepending (2)
Last week I began discussing why AS Path Prepend doesn’t always affect traffic the way we think it will. Two other observations from the research paper I’m working off of were:
- Adding two prepends will move more traffic than adding a single prepend
- It’s not possible to move traffic incrementally by prepending; when it works, prepending will end up moving most of the traffic from one inbound path to another
A slightly more complex network will help explain these two observations.
The Hedge 83: Bruce Davie and the System View
Network engineers tend to look at the world through the lens of a single device—an individual appliance, sold by a vendor, with a well-developed CLI for configuration and maintenance. Networks, however, are the “odd person out” in the world of information technology. In the broader technology world, a stronger systems-oriented view is more common. In this episode of the Hedge, Bruce Davie joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss a systems view of the world, as well as a new publishing model he’s working on, and some thoughts on the place of SDN.
The Effectiveness of AS Path Prepending (1)
Just about everyone prepends AS’ to shift inbound traffic from one provider to another—but does this really work? First, a short review on prepending, and then a look at some recent research in this area.
The Hedge 82: Jared Smith and Route Poisoning
Intentionally poisoning BGP routes in the Default-Free Zone (DFZ) would always be a bad thing, right? Actually, this is a fairly common method to steer traffic flows away from and through specific autonomous systems. How does this work, how common is it, and who does this? Jared Smith joins us on this episode of the Hedge to discuss the technique, and his research into how frequently it is used.
Ambiguity and complexity: once more into the breach
Recent research into the text of RFCs versus the security of the protocols described came to this conclusion—
The Hedge 81: Jana Iyengar and QUIC
QUIC is a middle-aged protocol at this point—it’s several years old, and widely deployed although TCP still dominates the transport layer of the Internet. In this episode of the Hedge, Jana Iyengar joins Alvaro Retana and Russ White to discuss the motivation for developing QUIC, and its ongoing development and deployment.
The Hedge 80: Ian Goetz and 5G
Although there are varying opinions 5G—is it real? Is it really going to have extremely low latency? Does the disaggregation of software and hardware really matter? Is it really going to provide a lot more bandwidth? Are existing backhaul networks going to be able to handle the additional load? For network engineers in particular, the world of 5G is a foreign country with its own language, expectations, and ways of doing things.
Complexity Reduction?
Back in January, I ran into an interesting article called The many lies about reducing complexity:
Reducing complexity sells. Especially managers in IT are sensitive to it as complexity generally is their biggest headache. Hence, in IT, people are in a perennial fight to make the complexity bearable.
The Hedge 79: Brooks Westbrook and the Data Driven Lens
Many networks are designed and operationally drive by the configuration and management of features supporting applications and use cases. For network engineering to catch up to the rest of the operational world, it needs to move rapidly towards data driven management based on a solid understanding of the underlying protocols and systems. Brooks Westbrook joins Tom Amman and Russ White to discuss the data driven lens in this episode of the Hedge.