Monthly Archives: March 2020

The Bane of Backwards Compatibility

Posted on by
Reply

I’m a huge fan of video games. I love playing them, especially on my old consoles from my formative years. The original Nintendo consoles were my childhood friends as much as anything else. By the time I graduated from high school, everyone had started moving toward the Sony Playstation. I didn’t end up buying into that ecosystem as I started college. Instead, I just waited for my brother to pick up a new console and give me his old one.

This meant I was always behind the curve on getting to play the latest games. I was fine with that, since the games I wanted to play were on the old console. The new one didn’t have anything that interested me. And by the time the games that I wanted to play did come out it wouldn’t be long until my brother got a new one anyway. But one thing I kept hearing was that the Playstation was backwards compatible with the old generation of games. I could buy a current console and play most of the older games on it. I wondered how they managed to pull that off since Nintendo never did.

When I was older, I did some research into how they managed to build backwards compatibility into the old consoles. I always assumed it was some kind of translation engine or enhanced capabilities. Instead, I found out it was something much less complicated. For the PS2, the same controller chip from the PS1 was used, which ensured backwards compatibility. For the PS3, they essentially built the guts of a PS2 into the main board. It was about as elegant as you could get. However, later in the life of those consoles, system redesigns made them less compatible. Turns out that it isn’t easy to create backwards compatibility when you redesign things to remove the extra hardware you added.

Bringing It Back To The Old School

Cool story, but what does it have to do with enterprise technology? Well, the odds are good that you’re about to fight a backwards compatibility nightmare on two fronts. The first is with WPA3, the newest security protocol from the Wi-Fi Alliance. WPA3 fixes a lot of holes that were present in the ancient WPA2 and includes options to protect public traffic and secure systems from race conditions and key exchange exploits. You’d think it was designed to be more secure and would take a long time to break right? Well, you’d be wrong. That’s because WPA3 was exploited last year thanks to a vulnerability in the WPA3-Transition mode designed to enhance backwards compatibility.

WPA3-Transition Mode is designed to keep people from needing to upgrade their wireless cards and client software in one fell swoop. It can configure a WPA3 SSID with the ability for WPA2 clients to connect to it without all the new enhanced requirements. Practically, it means you don’t have to run two separate SSIDs for all your devices as you move from older to newer. But practical doesn’t cover the fact that security vulnerabilities exist in the transition mechanism. Enterprising attackers can exploit the weaknesses in the transition setup to crack your security.

It’s not unlike the old vulnerabilities in WPA when it used TKIP. TKIP was found to have a vulnerability that allowed for exploiting. People were advised to upgrade to WPA-AES as soon as possible to prevent this. But if you enabled older non-AES capable clients to connect to your SSIDs for compatibility reasons you invalidated all that extra security. Because AES had to operate in TKIP mode to connect the TKIP clients. And because the newer clients were happy to use TKIP over AES you were stuck using a vulnerable mode. The only real solution was to have a WPA-AES SSID to connect to for your newer secure clients and leave a WPA-TKIP SSID active for the clients that had to use it until they could be upgraded.

4Gs for the Price of 5

The second major area where we’re going see issues with backwards compatibility is with 5G networking. We’re hearing about the move to using 5G everywhere. We’ve no doubt heard by now that 5G is going to replace enterprise wireless or change the way we connect to things. Honestly, I’m not surprised someone has tried to make the claim that 5G can make waffles and coffee yet. But 5G is rife with the same backwards compatibility issues present in enterprise wireless too.

5G is an evolution of the 4G standards. Phones issued today are going to have 4G and 5G radios and the base stations are going to mix the radio types to ensure those phones can connect. Just like any new technology, they’re going to maximize the connectivity of the existing infrastructure and hope that it’s enough to keep things running as they build out the new setup. But by running devices with two radios or having a better connection from the older devices, you’re going to set yourself up to have your new protocol inherently insecure thanks to vulnerabilities in the old versions. It’s already projected that governments are going to take advantage of this for a variety of purposes.

We find ourselves in the same boat as we do with WPA3. Because we have to ensure maximum compatibility, we make sacrifices. We keep two different versions running at the same time, which increases complexity. We even mark a lot of necessary security upgrades as optional in order to keep people from refusing to implement them or fall behind because they don’t understand them1.

The biggest failing for me is that we’re pushing for backwards compatibility and performance over security. We’re not willing to make the hard choices to reduce functionality in order to save our privacy and security. We want things to be backwards compatible so we can buy one device today and have it work on everything. We’ll just make the next one more secure. Or the one after that. Until we realize that we’re still running old 802.11 data rates in our newest protocols because no one bothered to remove them. We have to make hard choices sometimes and sacrifice some compatibility in order to ensure that we’re safe and secure with the newer technology.

Tom’s Take

Backwards compatibility is like the worst kind of nostalgia. I want the old thing but I want it on a new thing that runs faster. I want the glowing warmth of my youth but with the convenience of modern technology. It’s like buying an old sports car. Sure, you get all the look and feel of an old powerful engine. You also lose the safety features of the new body along with the comforts you’ve become accustomed to. You have to make a hard choice. Do you keep the old car original and lose out on what you like to get what you want? Or do you create some kind of hybrid that has exactly what you want and need but isn’t what you started with? It’s a tough choice to make. In the world of technology, there’s no right answer. But we need to remember that every compromise we make for performance can lead to compromises in security.

  1. I’m looking at you, OWE ↩︎

Fast Friday Thoughts on Where We Are

Posted on by
Reply

It’s been a crazy week. I know the curse is “May you live in interesting times,” but I’m more than ready for things to be less interesting for a while. It’s going to take some time to adjust to things. From a networking perspective, I have a few things that have sprung up.

  • Video conferencing is now a big thing. Strangely, Cisco couldn’t make video the new phone. But when people are stuck at home now we need to do video again? I get that people have a need to see each other face-to-face. But having worked from home for almost seven years at this point I can tell you video isn’t a necessity. It’s a nice option, but you can get a lot accomplished with video calls and regular emails.
  • Along side this is the fact that the push to put more video out there is causing applications to reach their breaking points. Zoom, which is fairing the best out of all of them so far, had some issues on Thursday morning. Tripling the amount of traffic that’s going out and making it very sensitive to delay and jitter is going expose a lot of flaws in the system.
  • I applaud all of the companies in the last week that have chosen to step out and offer resources to help people work better from home. I also hope that employees and managers use them after this is over to help enable more remote work. Just remember that flexibility has a cost axis as well. Those VPNs and security services and CASBs aren’t going to be free forever. If it makes sense, use it. Otherwise, find something that does.
  • Remember that this is a stressful time for everyone. I work from home all the time. And this week I have been totally exhausted. Try to find a way to keep your sanity. Step outside for air. Take a short break. Look for ways to keep yourself healthy. It’s going to take time for people to adjust to this. It’s going to take time even if you know how to work remotely too.

Tom’s Take

I’m not sure where this is all headed. We’re all still figuring it out. Things won’t look the same six months from now no matter what. But keep working where you can and improving what you do. The value in this shift comes from empowering us to do what we can. If that means cutting back on Netflix during working hours or spending some extra time learning a new skill make it happen and grow as much as you can. We’re going to need that.

I Hate Excellent Questions

Posted on by
2

I was listening to a recent episode of the Packet Pushers Podcast about SD-WAN and some other stuff. At one point, my good friend Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind) asked the guest something, and the guest replied with, “That’s an excellent question!” Greg replied with, “Of course it was. I only ask excellent questions.” I was walking and laughed out loud harder than I’ve laughed in a long time.

This was also a common theme during Networking Field Day. Everyone was asking “great” or “excellent” questions. I chuckled and told the delegates that it was a canned response that most presenters give today. But then I wondered why all our questions are excellent. And why I hated that response so much.

Can You Define “Excellent”?

The first reason why I think people tend to counter with “excellent” praise is because they are stalling for an answer. It’s a time-honored tradition from spelling bees when you don’t know how to spell the word and you need a few more seconds to figure out if this is one of those “i before e” words or not. I get the purpose of defining something of non-native speaker origin. But defining a simple word? It’s such a recognizable trope that we incorporated some of the fun into a video we did a few years ago at Aruba Atmosphere:

Watching my friends “stall” while they’re trying to figure out how to spell a made up word still cracks me up.

More importantly, in technology this response is designed to help the engineer or tech person spend a few critical seconds formulating their response and matching it to the question that was asked. Even just a second of memorized, practiced response repetition means you can think about how to answer the question without leaving silence.

We live in a world today where silence is bad. We’re so used to hearing noise and other kinds of filler that anything regarded as contemplation or thinking is negative. Instead, we must always be talking and making an audible effort to answer things. Even if it means repeating the same phrases over and over again. It’s bad enough when it’s a pause word. It’s really bad when it’s the same word at the beginning of a sentence for almost an hour. “That’s an excellent question” is quickly becoming the response equivalent of “um” in the vocabulary.

High Praise, Indeed

The other reason why I think people are quick to praise “excellent” questions comes from a bit of social trickery. Sadly, too many sales opportunities descend into an antagonistic relationship where salespeople feel they have to use every trick in the book to separate people from their money. They use tactics designed to inflate egos and make people feel more important so they feel like their making a good decision.

Think about the suspect phrasing here. It’s not a “good” question. Or even a “great” question. It’s almost always an “excellent” question. And I’d argue that the more likely a person is to sell you something, the more likely that person is to remark that all your questions are excellent.

This kind of puffery can be infuriating to people. It’s not unlike the standard “have you lost weight?” opening when you see someone for the first time in a long time. It’s verbal garbage. You don’t believe it. They don’t believe it. It’s rare that people even acknowledge it. And yet, we find ourselves repeating it over and over again. “That’s an excellent question” is ego stroking at its finest.

And the worst part? You’re not praising the person! You’re praising their question. You’re really saying that the words they used were good enough to merit praise. It’s not even that you are praising the person as much as their output. If you really, really, really feel the need to do this, think about doing it in a way that calls out the person asking the question instead:

  • Wow, you’re really paying attention here!
  • Did you read ahead?
  • You’re really getting this.
  • I’m very impressed with your grasp of this topic.

See how each of these responses is designed to work with the person in mind and not just the question? Sure, there s a bit more ego stroking here than with a simple “excellent” question. But if you’re just trying to flatter the person and you don’t even care about the quality of the question why not just sell out all the way? If the point of the response is to make a person feel good about themselves then just go all out.

Tom’s Take

I’m not likely to change the world overnight. Lord knows I’ve lost the battle against GIF and on-premises enough already and those are grammatically correct. The “excellent” question thing is a quirk of speech that isn’t going to just disappear because we bring it to light. People are still going to stall or try to boost the questioner’s ego. They’re still going to fill silence or make people full of themselves. Instead of falling back on the tropes of bygone eras, be a different person next time. Instead of the knee-jerk reaction of excellence, take a moment to think and praise the person asking the question. Then give a solid answer that they need to hear. You’ll find it a lot more effective. In fact, I’d venture to say it’s an excellent strategy.

There Are No More Green Fields

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve looked at quite a few pieces of technology in the past few years. Some have addressed massive issues that I had when I was a practicing network engineer. Others have shown me new ways to do things I never thought possible. But one category of technology still baffles me to this day: The technology that assumes greenfield deployment.

For those not familiar, “greenfield” is a term that refers to a project that is built on a site completely from scratch. It originally comes from a day when the project in question was a factory or other capital improvement that was literally being built in a field with green grass growing on top. The alternative to that project was one where something was being built in a location where there was existing infrastructure or other form of site pollution. And, of course because everyone in humanity never gets older than twelve, this is called a “brownfield” site.

Getting back to the technology side of things, let’s talk about greenfield deployments. When was the last time you walked into a building and found zero technology of any kind? Odds are good that’s not the case. Sure, there are some SMBs that have minimal technology. There are a lot of organizations that have just the basics. But the days of walking into a completely empty building and rolling out new PCs, phones, and software loads are gone. So too are the days of zero wireless coverage, no existing networking equipment, and no server hardware.

No matter how big your organization is right now, there is some solution that can get you connected quickly. The number of times that I’ve heard of the office “IT Person” going to a big box store and buying a consumer-grade router to get a couple of MacBooks on the Internet is more than you might think. The need for office phone systems has been supplanted with mobile phones thanks to unlimited minutes and apps that run just about everything now. The infrastructure in the office is now just a wireless router and a subscription to an application suite. If you’re really enterprising you might even have a server or two running in AWS.

What Can Brown Do For Me

The world is brown now. There are no green fields left. Technology has invaded every part of our life. 45% of the world’s population carries a smartphone in their pocket and the number is climbing quickly. Everyone has access to some form of computing device that runs software, whether it’s a phone, PC, laptop, or device in a public place like a library. The Internet is ubiquitous with mobile device data plans and free Wi-Fi springing up in every coffee shop and retail location you can see.

Why then would a company assume there are greenfield deployment opportunities left out there? If you know that companies are going to have some kind of existing infrastructure why would you build a product that assumes otherwise? I understand that when you’re building something that no one has ever seen before that the likelihood of having to replace existing technology is low. But you are still going to need to integrate that exciting new tech with something else, aren’t you?

Building Blocks

Organizations have a mentality of building in phases. We need new capacity in this location so we build it out. Maybe it’s a rack or a pod or a building. The basic idea is the same. We need to add a component so we add it on like it was a Lego brick component. That kind of mentality is helped along by systems that can be deployed quickly in a turnkey fashion. It’s how technology operates today.

But that same turnkey system can become a pariah of technology if it doesn’t interoperate well with the other technology on-site. Build a network fabric that doesn’t play well with others? Your pod deployment is probably going to be a one-off. Build a storage solution that doesn’t interface well with virtual servers? Might not be an additions to that storage unit. Build a backup tool that doesn’t work with cloud storage or volumes? Guess what won’t be getting backed up any time soon?

Developing in a vacuum speeds time to market for sure. But it also tells your customers that you don’t really have much of a plan aside from “we hope you only buy our gear”. Imagine if there was a tire company that released a tire that could only work on a couple of new cars that were just released and not on any other cars on the market. Unless those tires were $2,500 each that company would like go out of business very quickly. Sure, it’s easy to build a high performance tire that only works with those two cars. But what if the people that own those two cars don’t want that tire? Or they don’t want to pay that price for it?

The alternative is to take the extra time and effort to realize that brownfield deployments are the norm now. You can’t hope to build something and not realize people are going to integrate it into their existing infrastructure. It’s reasonable to assume that an enterprise solution is going to replace consumer-grade equipment. It’s also fair to think that a complete solution may or may not replace an existing competing solution. But don’t assume that your technology is going to be deployed somewhere that doesn’t have any technology. Learn how those devices work and figure out how to interface with them. Make it easy for people to manage both the solutions or you may find yourself missing out on a sale.

Tom’s Take

Tom Watson is famous for having said, “There’s a world market for maybe 5 computers.” Of course, he said that almost 80 years ago when computers were in their infancy and the size of a garage. Today, we have computers everywhere. Yet we still see companies that think there’s a market for something that they built that isn’t completely revolutionary. Even with cutting edge technology like AR/VR or ultra mobile computers you still see existing technology as an interface point. It’s time to stop thinking that the world is a verdant field of green just waiting for the right solution to come along. Instead, think of the world as a pile of Lego houses waiting for your solution to be placed right beside it.