Why Privacy?

2 February 2022 | Comments Off on Why Privacy?

I’ve kicked off a series over at Packet Pushers on the ; the first installment is up now.

Hedge 103: BGP Security with Geoff Huston

6 October 2021 |

Our community has been talking about BGP security for over 20 years. While MANRS and the RPKI have made some headway in securing BGP, the process of deciding on a method to provide at least the information providers need to make more rational decisions about the validity of individual routes is still ongoing. Geoff Huston joins Alvaro, Russ, and Tom to discuss how we got here and whether we will learn from our mistakes.

Marketing Wins

30 August 2021 | Comments Off on Marketing Wins

Off-topic post for today …

In the battle between marketing and security, marketing always wins. This topic came to mind after reading an article on using email aliases to control your email—

For example, if you sign up for a lot of email newsletters, consider doing so with an alias. That way, you can quickly filter the incoming messages sent to that alias—these are probably low-priority, so you can have your provider automatically apply specific labels, mark them as read, or delete them immediately.

NATs, PATs, and Network Hygiene

13 July 2021 | Comments Off on NATs, PATs, and Network Hygiene

While reading a research paper on address spoofing from 2019, I ran into this on NAT (really PAT) failures—

In the first failure mode, the NAT simply forwards the packets with the spoofed source address (the victim) intact … In the second failure mode, the NAT rewrites the source address to the NAT’s publicly routable address, and forwards the packet to the amplifier. When the server replies, the NAT system does the inverse translation of the source address, expecting to deliver the packet to an internal system. However, because the mapping is between two routable addresses external to the NAT, the packet is routed by the NAT towards the victim.

Illusory Correlation and Security

31 May 2021 | Comments Off on 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 82: Jared Smith and Route Poisoning

6 May 2021 | Comments Off on 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.

If you haven’t found the tradeoffs …

26 April 2021 |

One of the big movements in the networking world is disaggregation—splitting the control plane and other applications that make the network “go” from the hardware and the network operating system. This is, in fact, one of the movements I’ve been arguing in favor of for many years—and I’m not about to change my perspective on the topic.

Loose Lips

12 April 2021 | Comments Off on Loose Lips

When I was in the military we were constantly drilled about the problem of Essential Elements of Friendly Information, or EEFIs. What are EEFis? If an adversary can cast a wide net of surveillance, they can often find multiple clues about what you are planning to do, or who is making which decisions. For instance, if several people married to military members all make plans to be without their spouses for a long period of time, the adversary can be certain a unit is about to be deployed. If the unit of each member can be determined, then the strength, positioning, and other facts about what action you are taking can be guessed.

The Insecurity of Ambiguous Standards

29 March 2021 | Comments Off on The Insecurity of Ambiguous Standards

Why are networks so insecure?

One reason is we don’t take network security seriously. We just don’t think of the network as a serious target of attack. Or we think of security as a problem “over there,” something that exists in the application realm, that needs to be solved by application developers. Or we think the consequences of a network security breach as “well, they can DDoS us, and then we can figure out how to move load around, so if we build with resilience (enough redundancy) we’re already taking care of our security issues.” Or we put our trust in the firewall, which sits there like some magic box solving all our problems.

The History of Identity with Pamela Dingle

16 March 2021 | Comments Off on The History of Identity with Pamela Dingle

While identity is not directly a networking technology, it is closely adjacent to networking, and a critical part of the Internet’s architecture. In this episode of the History of Networking, Pamela Dingle joins Donald Sharpe and Russ White to discuss the humble beginnings of modern identity systems, including NDS and Streettalk.