The Hedge 86: TCPLS
TCP and QUIC are the two primary transport protocols in use on the Internet today—QUIC carries a large part of the HTTP traffic that makes the web work, while TCP carries most everything else that expects reliability. Why can’t we apply the lessons from QUIC to TCP so we can merge these two protocols, unifying Internet transport? TCPLS is just such an attempt at merging the most widely used reliable transport protocols.
Illusory Correlation and Security
Fear sells. Fear of missing out, fear of being an imposter, fear of crime, fear of injury, fear of sickness … we can all think of times when people we know (or worse, a people in the throes of madness of crowds) have made really bad decisions because they were afraid of something. Bruce Schneier has documented this a number of times. For instance: “it’s smart politics to exaggerate terrorist threats” and “fear makes people deferential, docile, and distrustful, and both politicians and marketers have learned to take advantage of this.”
The Hedge 85: Terry Slattery and the ROI of Automation
It’s easy to assume automation can solve anything and that it’s cheap to deploy—that there are a lot of upsides to automation, and no downsides. In this episode of the Hedge, Terry Slattery joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss something we don’t often talk about, the Return on Investment (ROI) of automation.
Is it really the best just because its the most common?
I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard someone ask these two questions—
- What are other people doing?
- What is the best common practice?
While these questions have always bothered me, I could never really put my finger on why. I ran across a journal article recently that helped me understand a bit better. The root of the problem is this—what does best common mean, and how can following the best common produce a set of actions you can be confident will solve your problem?
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.
