The little green lock—now being deprecated by some browsers—provides some level of comfort for many users when entering personal information on a web site. You probably know the little green lock means the traffic between the host and the site is encrypted, but you might not stop to ask the fundamental question of all cryptography:…
The security of the global Default Free Zone DFZ) has been a topic of much debate and concern for the last twenty years (or more). Two recent papers have brought this issue to the surface once again—it is worth looking at what these two papers add to the mix of what is known, and what…
When you think of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, you probably think about an attack which overflows the bandwidth available on a single link; or overflowing the number of half open TCP sessions a device can have open at once, preventing the device from accepting more sessions. In all cases, a DoS or…
The DNS system is, unfortunately, rife with holes like Swiss Cheese; man-in-the-middle attacks can easily negate the operation of TLS and web site security. To resolve these problems, the IETF and the DNS community standardized a set of cryptographic extensions to cryptographically sign all DNS records. These signatures rely on public/private key pairs that are…
Network engineers focus on protocols and software, but somehow all of this work must connect to the hardware on which packets are switched, and data is processed. A big part of the physical side of what networks “do” is power—how it is used, and how it is managed. The availability of power is one of…