Monthly Archives: April 2020

Eventually Secure?

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I have a Disney+ account. I have kids and I like Star Wars, so it made sense. I got it all set up the day it came out and started binge watching the Mandalorian. However, in my haste to get things up and running I reused an old password instead of practicing good hygiene. As the titular character might scold me, “This is not the way.” I didn’t think anything about it until I got a notification that someone from New Jersey logged into my account.

I panicked and reset my password like a good security person should have done in the first place. I waited for the usual complaints that people had been logged out of the app and prepared to log everyone in again and figure out how to remove my New Jersey interloper. Imagine my surprise when no one came to ask me to turn Phineas and Ferb back on. Imagine my further surprise when I looked in the app and on the Disney+ website and couldn’t find a way to see which devices were logged in to this account. Nor could I find a way to disconnect a rogue device as I could with Netflix or Hulu.

I later found out that this functionality exists but you have to call the Disney+ support team to make it happen. I also have no doubts that the functionality will eventually come to the app as more and more people are sharing account information so they can binge watch Clone Wars. However, this eventual security planning has me a bit concerned. And that concern extends beyond Mice and Mandalorians.

Minimum Secure Product

If you’re figuring out how to secure your newest application or a new building or even just a new user, you first have to figure out what “secure” looks like. If you have trouble figuring that out, all you need to do is look at your closest competitor. They will usually have a good baseline of the security and accessibility features you should have.

Maybe it’s basic device and user controls like the Disney+ example above. Maybe it’s encryption of your traffic end-to-end, as Zoom learned a couple of weeks ago. Or maybe it’s something as simple as ensuring that you don’t have a hard-coded backdoor password for SSH, like Fortinet remembered earlier this year. The real point is that you can survey the landscape and figure out what you need to do to make your product or app meet a minimum standard.

On the extremely off-chance that you’re developing something new and unique and never-before-seen in the world, you have a different problem. For one, you need to chill on the marketing. Maybe you’re using something in a novel and different way. But unless you’ve developed psychic powers or anti-gravity boosters or maybe teleportation you haven’t come up with anything completely unique. Secondly, you still have some references to draw on. You can look for similar things and use similar security controls.

If your teleport requires a login by a qualified person to operate you should look at login security for other industries that are similar to determine what is appropriate. Maybe it’s like a medical facility where you have two-factor authentication (2FA) with smart cards or tokens as well as passwords or biometrics. Maybe it’s a lockout system with two operators required to engage the mechanism so someone’s arm doesn’t actually get teleported away without the rest of them. Even if your teleport produces massive amounts of logs you should keep them lest someone show up on the other pad with a different color hair than when they left. Those logs may be different from anything ever seen before, but even Airbus knows how to store the flight data from every A380 flight.

Security isn’t a hard problem. It’s a series of challenges that must be overcome. All of them are rooted in common sense and discovery. Sure, you may not know all the problems right now. But you know what they look like in general and you also know what the outcome should look like. Common sense comes into play when you start thinking like a bad actor. If I were able to get into this app, what would I want to do? Maybe I want to sign up for the all-inclusive package and not get a confirmation sent to an account. So put a control in place that makes you confirm that. Sure, it reduces the likelihood that someone is going to sign up for something without realizing what they’ve done. But the side effect is that you also have happier customers because they were stopped from doing something they may not have wanted to do. Your security controls served a double purpose.

Tom’s Take

Ultimately, security should be about preventing bad or unwanted outcomes. Theft, destruction, and impersonation are all undesired outcomes of something. If your platform doesn’t protect against those you are not secure. If your process requires intervention to make those outcomes happen you’re not there yet. Disney+ could have launched with device reports and the ability to force logoff after password change. But the developers were focused on other things. It’s time for developers to learn how to examine what the minimum requirements are to be secure and ensure they’re included in the process along the way. We shouldn’t have to hope that we might one day become eventually secure.

Creating Conspicuously Compelling Content

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It’s funny how little things change in the middle of big, world changing experiences. I’ve noticed that my daily blog viewership has gone down, as have many other folks I’ve talked to. The number of people reading has been reduced for some reason. However the number of video views of content on other platforms like Youtube has gone up dramatically. It’s almost like the people that were reading because they wanted to get a quick digest now have the free time to watch a whole video on a topic.

I got on the bandwagon too, recently publishing my first episode of Tomversations this week. I’ve also talked to several friends that are either starting or restarting a podcast. The gold mine for content creation has opened for business. However, I still hear the same refrains about content that I’ve heard for years when I talk about writing:

  • “I don’t have anything to say!”
  • “It’s hard to write things down!”
  • “Isn’t it easier to just talk about stuff?”

These are all valid questions, no matter what medium you’re developing for. But let me give you a roadmap to take those objections, turn them on their heads, and be able to create any kind of content you want to produce. And yes, because you’re reading this instead of watching it, be prepared to write just a little. I promise it will pay off.

Writer’s Clearinghouse

You can’t create without ideas, right? You need some way to jot down all the things you think about. Photographers have a saying that the best camera is the one you have with you. I would say that the best note taking device you own is the one you have with you that you use. I know a lot of people that carry pens and little notebooks, like my favorite ones from Field Notes. They think that having a few pieces of paper in their pocket is enough to get their ideas to spring forth from their forehead like an ethereal Athena. Sadly, that’s not the case. If you don’t use your note taking device often you won’t build a habit of using it when you get an idea.

For example, I take notes in a variety of places. One of them is a program called Drafts. I’ve recently started using it to corral all my random ideas. Thoughts about posts. Story outlines. Scripts for videos. You name it. If it think it, it goes in a draft somewhere. It’s like my digital version of The Jones Grail Diary. It’s not organized, but it doesn’t have to be. Just enough reference for me to remember what I was talking about and the main idea. Sometimes I’ll pull out my phone during conversations to take notes. Those drafts are then synced back to my laptop for perusal and consolidation. Whatever tool your using, make sure you use it as soon as you get the idea. If that poor thought escapes into the nether realm of your brain it’s no good to anyone.

And don’t be afraid to jot down the craziest things. No idea is wasted if it’s on paper somewhere. You never know when you’ll create BGP on napkins. Just make sure you have all those papers or drafts in a place where you check them. If not writing something down is bad, writing it down and forgetting to check in on it is just a little bit better, but still bad.

Outline Everything

People think that when they start a conversation or join a podcast recording that magic is just going to happen. The ideas are going to flow and we’re going to have compelling content. The real world couldn’t get any further from the truth. Ideas spring from nowhere, but they grow very slowly. In order to really build around them, you need to nurture then along with some help. And that help usually takes the form of an outline.

Outlines help you plan out your ideas and support them. Remember how we were all taught to write paragraphs in elementary school? Main ideas followed by two or three supporting sentences. It’s basically and reads like formula written by a fourth grader. Guess what? That’s a perfect outline. When I started writing this post in my head, I started with the main ideas and then wrote down supporting ideas. Now that you’re out of high school grammar class you can build around your paragraphs with more than just a detail or two. You can add anecdotes or data or even pictures. And that makes your content nice and supported.

Outlines also help the thinking process. When I record podcasts I have an outline. The Gestalt IT Rundown happens because Rich researches the stories that we riff on. I can make jokes because I know the stories ahead of time. We work on where to put stories because some are better fodder for jokes than others. That’s the outline process. Podcasts are no different no matter how many guests you have. Maybe it’s a one-on-one episode. There’s an outline of the flow of the episode. It may be very detailed to hit all the points. If it’s a community show or discussion, there may be a loose outline designed to give some guardrails to the content. Even a one-sentence main idea for the topic can be and outline if you keep referring your discussion and arguments back to it.

Savage Writing

I know far too many people that treat their first draft like some kind of sacred relic. This is the best thing I’ve ever produced and it can never change from this form. I will pour my effort into it and that’s all I need.

That’s crap.

First drafts are one step removed from outlines and notes. They’re tying things together. Treat them like sketches and not paintings. Don’t be afraid to rearrange, delete, or outright destroy them. There have been many drafts that have been deleted or radically changed by the time I got to the end of the last paragraph. Likewise, there are times when I realize halfway through a conversation that we need to take things in a different direction. The value of being able to change your mind is that you do it when you need to.

Drafts should be massaged and built up to get to a final product. But don’t be afraid to put them on the shelf and let them sit until the time is right. I have dozens of drafts in my archives waiting for more attention, more research, or better timing to be effective. The ideas are sound. The outlines are good. They just need more than I can give right now. Or maybe the topic isn’t quite ready to be discussed at length. What’s important is that the work I’ve done is already waiting for me when I want to come back to it.

Coming back to your work after the fact is an important thing to try if you feel stuck. I’ve been known to walk away from a draft post or script because I need to get my head out of the wagon rut thinking I was in. Forcing myself to do something else or talk to someone to change my way of thinking has done wonders. Coming back to something with fresh eyes and brain cells often makes a huge difference. You can catch little mistakes or realize there’s a better way to state your argument. The time it takes to change your mind for a few minutes probably would have been wasted on doing nothing anyway.

Just Record.

Okay, you’ve jotted down ideas, built your outline, and written a script or a first draft. What do you do now? Well, like my other famous advice, you need to record your thoughts. Just. Record.

Don’t get caught up in things like perfect lighting or audio balance. Don’t freak out if you stammer or someone drives a garbage truck past your recording studio. Just get the thoughts down. Get a feel for how the flow works. Often, you’ll find that you think of changes on the fly. New ways to word things. New supporting ideas that work better for your discussion. I’ve been known to come up with some really great analogies halfway through an explanation that I would never have been able to think of otherwise. You have to get the content down somewhere.

You can always record again. You can always edit mistakes. You can record the intro last and the ending first. You can fix just about anything in post-production after you get the hang of it. The key is that you’re capturing content. Just like writing or outlining or note taking. It’s happening and the content is being created.

Tom’s Take

Content may not be perfect the first time, but neither was the electric light bulb. It’s only through the process of forming things that we can refine them to something that works. Every creative endeavor is rough around the edges. As time goes on, the wear is less apparent as you focus on the good instead of the bad. The errors are less conspicuous than the content you want to share.

BGP Hell Is Other People

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If you configure a newsreader to alert you every time someone hijacks a BGP autonomous system (AS), it will probably go off at least once a week. The most recent one was on the first of April courtesy of Rostelecom. But they’re not the only one. They’re just the latest. The incidences of people redirecting BGP, either by accident or by design, are becoming more and more frequent. And as we rely more and more on things like cloud computing and online applications to do our daily work and live our lives, the impact of these hijacks is becoming more and more critical.

Professional-Grade Protocol

BGP isn’t the oldest thing on the Internet. RFC 1105 is the initial draft of Border Gateway Protocol. The version that we use today, BGP4, is documented in RFC 4271. It’s a protocol that has enjoyed a long history of revisions and a reviled history of making networking engineers’ lives difficult. But why is that? How can a routing protocol be so critical and yet obtuse?

My friend Marko Milivojevic famously stated in his CCIE training career that, “BGP isn’t a routing protocol. It’s a policy engine.” When you look at the decisions of BGP in this light it makes a lot more sense. BGP isn’t necessarily concerns with the minutia of figuring out exactly how to get somewhere. Sure, it has a table of prefixes that it uses to make decisions about where to forward packets. Almost every protocol does this. But BGP is different because it’s so customizable.

Have you ever tried to influence a route in RIP or OSPF? It’s not exactly easy. RIP is almost impossible to manipulate outside of things like route poisoning or just turning off interfaces. Sometimes the simplest things are the most hardened. OSPF gives us a lot more knobs to play with, like interface bandwidth and link delay. We can tweak and twerk those values to our heart’s content to make packets flow a certain direction. But we don’t have a lot of influence outside of a specific area for those values. If you’ve ever had to memorize the minutia of OSPF not-so-stubby-areas, ASBRs, and the different between Type 5 and Type 7 LSAs you know that these topics were all but created for certification exams.

But what about BGP? How can you influence routes in BGP? Oh, man! How much time do you have??? We can manipulate things all sorts of ways!

  • Weight the routes to prefer one over another
  • Set LOCAL_PREFERENCE to pick which route to use in a multiple exit system
  • Configure multi-exit discriminator (MED) values
  • AS Path Prepending to reduce the likelihood of a path being chosen
  • Manipulate the underlying routing protocol to make certain routes look more preferred
  • Just change the router ID to something crazy low to break all the other ties in the system

That’s a lot of knobs! Why on earth would you do that to someone? Because professionals need options.

Optional Awfulness

BGP is one of those curious things that seems to be built without guardrails because it’s never used on accident. You’ve probably seen something similar in the real world whenever a person removes a safety feature or modifies a device to increase performance and remove an annoyance designed to slow them down. It could be anything from wrapping a bandana around a safety switch lockout to keep something running to pulling the trigger guard off a nail gun so you don’t keep hitting it with your fingers. Some professionals believe that safety features aren’t keeping them safe as much as they are slowing them down. Something as simple as removing the safety from a pellet gun can have dire consequences in the name of efficiency.

So, how does this apply to our new favorite policy engine that happens to route packets? Well, it applies quite a bit. There is no system of guardrails that keeps you from making dumb choices. Accidentally paste your own AS into the AS Path? That’s going to be a routing decision that is considered. Make a typo for an AS that doesn’t exist in the routing table? That’s going into the formula, too. Announcing to the entire world you have the best path to an AS somewhere on the other side of the world? BGP is happy to send traffic your way.

BGP assumes that professionals are programming it. Which means it’s not going to try and stop you from shooting off your own foot. And because the number of knobs that are exposed by the engine are large and varied you can spend a lot of time trying to troubleshoot just how half of a cloud provider’s traffic came barreling through your network for the last hour. CCIEs spend a lot of time memorizing BGP path selection because every step matters when trying to figure out why BGP is acting up. Likewise, knowing where the knobs are best utilized means knowing how to influence path selection. AS Path prepending is probably the best example of this. If you want to put that AS number in there a hundred times to influence path selection you go for it. Why? Because it’s something you can do. Or, more explicitly, something you aren’t prohibited from doing.

Which leads to the problem of route hijacking. BGP is going to do what you tell it to do because it assumes you’re not trying to do anything nefarious or stupid when you program it. Like an automation script, BGP is going to do whatever it is instructed to do by the policy engine as quickly as possible. Taking out normal propagation delays, BGP will sync things up within a matter of minutes. Maybe a few hours. Which means it’s not hard to watch a mistake cascade through the Internet. Or, in the case of people that are doing less-than-legal things, to watch the fruits of your labors succeed.

BGP isn’t inherently bad any more than claiming a catwalk without a handrail has an evil intent. Yes, the situation you find yourself in is less-than-ideal. Sure, something bad can happen if you screw up or do something you’re not supposed to. But blaming the protocol or the object or the situation is not going to fix the issue. We really only have two options at this point:

  • Better educate our users and engineers about how to use BGP and ensure that only qualified people are able to work on it
  • Create controls in BGP that limit the ability to use certain knobs and options in order to provide more security and reliability options.

Tom’s Take

I’m a proponent of both of those options. We need to ensure that people have the right training. However, we also need to ensure that nefarious actors are locked out and that we are protected from making dumb mistakes or that our errors aren’t propagated at light speed through the dark corners of the Internet. We can’t fix everything wrong with BGP but it’s the best option we have right now. Hellish though it may be, we have to find a way to make a better combination of the protocol and the people that use it.

SD-WAN and Technical Debt

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Back during Networking Field Day 22, I was having a fun conversation with Phil Gervasi (@Network_Phil) and Carl Fugate (@CarlFugate) about SD-WAN and innovation. I mentioned that it was fascinating to see how SD-WAN companies kept innovating but that bigger, more established companies that had bought into SD-WAN seemed to be having issues catching up. As our conversation continued I realized that technical debt plays a huge role in startup culture in all factors, not just with SD-WAN. However, SD-WAN is a great example of technical debt to talk about here.

Any Color You Want In Black

Big companies have investments in supply chains. They have products that are designed in a certain way because it’s the least expensive way to develop the project or it involves using technology developed by the company that gives them a competitive advantage. Think about something like the Cisco Nexus 9000-series switches that launched with Cisco ACI. Every one of them came with the Insieme ASIC that was built to accelerate the policy component of ACI. Whether or not you wanted to use ACI or Insieme in your deployment, you were getting the ASIC in the switch.

Policies like this lead to unintentional constraints in development. Think back five years to Cisco’s IWAN solution. It was very much the precursor to SD-WAN. It was a collection of technologies like Performance Routing (PfR), Application Visibility Control (AVC), Policy Based Routing (PBR), and Network Based Application Recognition (NBAR). If that alphabet soup of acronyms makes you break in hives, you’re not alone. Cisco IWAN was a platform very much market by potential and complexity.

Let’s step back and ask ourselves an important question: “Why?” Why was IWAN so complicated? Why was IWAN hard to deploy? Why did IWAN fail to capture a lot of market share and ride the wave that eventually became SD-WAN? Looking back, a lot of the choices that were made that eventually doomed IWAN can come down to existing technical debt. Cisco is a company that makes design decisions based on what they’ve been doing for a while.

I’m sure that the design criteria for IWAN came down to two points:

  1. It needs to run on IOS.
  2. It needs to be an ISR router.

That doesn’t sound like much. But imagine the constraints you run into with just those two limitations. You have a hardware platform that may not be suited for the kind of work you want to do. Maybe you want to take advantage of x86 chipset acceleration. Too bad. You have to run what’s in the ISR. Which means it could be underpowered. Or incapable of doing things like crypto acceleration for VPNs, which is important for building a mesh of encrypted tunnels. Or maybe you need some flexibility to build a better detection platform for applications. Except you have to use IOS. Which uses NBAR. And anything you write to extend NBAR has to run on their platforms going forward. Which means you need to account for every possible permutation of hardware that IOS runs on. Which is problematic at best.

See how technical debt can creep in from the most simplistic of sources? All we wanted to do was build a platform to connect WANs together easily. Now we’re mired in a years-old hardware choice and an aging software platform that can’t help us do what needs to be done. Is it any wonder why IWAN didn’t succeed in the original form? Or why so many people involved with the first generation of SD-WAN startups were involved with IWAN, even if just tangentially?

Debt-Free Development

Now, let’s look at a startup like CloudGenix, who was a presenter at Networking Field Day 22 and was recently acquired by Palo Alto Networks. They started off on a different path when they founded the startup. They knew what they wanted to accomplish. They had a vision for what would later be called SD-WAN. But instead of shoehorning it into an existing platform, they had the freedom to build what they wanted.

No need to keep the ISR platform? Great. That means you can build on x86 hardware to make your software more universally deployable on a variety of boxes. Speaking of boxes, using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) equipment means you can buy some very small devices to run the software. You don’t need a system designed to use ATM modules or T1 connections. If all you little system is ever going to use is Ethernet there’s no reason to include expansion at all. Maybe USB for something like a 4G/LTE modem. But those USB ports are baked into the board already.

A little side note here that came from Olivier Huynh Van of Gluware. You know the USB capabilities on a Cisco ISR? Yeah, the ISR chipset didn’t support USB natively. And it’s almost impossible to find USB that isn’t baked into an x86 board today. So Cisco had to add it to the ISR in a way that wasn’t 100% spec-supported. It’s essentially emulated in the OS. Which is why not every USB drive works in an ISR. Take that for what’s it’s worth.

Back to CloudGenix. Okay, so you have a platform you can build on. And you can build software that can run on any x86 device with Ethernet ports and USB devices. That means your software doesn’t need to do complicated things. It also means there are a lot of methods already out there for programming network operating systems for x86 hardware, such as Intel’s Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK). However CloudGenix chose to build their OS, they didn’t need to build everything completely from scratch. Even if they chose to do it there are still a ton of resources out there to help them get started. Which means you don’t have to restart your development every time you need to add a feature.

Also, the focus on building the functions you want into an OS you can bend to your needs means you don’t need to rely on other teams to build pieces of it. You can build your own GUI. You can make it look however you want. You can also make it operate in a manner that is easiest for your customer base. You don’t need to include every knob or button or bell and whistle. You can expose or hide functions as you wish. Don’t want customers to have tons of control over VPN creation or certificate authentication? You don’t need to worry about the GUI team exposing it without your permission. Simple and easy.

One other benefit of developing on platforms without technical debt? It’s easy to port your software from physical to virtual. CloudGenix was already successful in porting their software to run from physical hardware to the cloud thanks to CloudBlades. Could you imagine trying to get the original Cisco IWAN running in a cloud package for AWS or Azure? If those hives aren’t going crazy right now I’m sure you must have nerves or steel.

Tom’s Take

Technical debt is no joke. Every decision you make has consequences. And they may not be apparent for this generation of products. People you may never meet may have to live with your decisions as they try to build their vision. Sometimes you can work with those constraints. But more often than not brilliant people are going to jump ship and do it on their own. Not everyone is going to succeed. But for those that have the vision and drive and turn out something that works the rewards are legion. And that’s more than enough to pay off any debts, technical or not.