Archive for the ‘network’ Category.

ICANN/Verisign .com Registry Agreement

RSA develops selective RFID blocker

RSA Seeks to Fix RFID Worries

RFID readers can’t talk to more than one tag at a time, so when multiple tags reply to a query, the readers detect a collision and revert to what’s known as a singulation protocol to communicate with each tag individually. To accomplish this, the reader queries each tag for its next bit, which identifies which portion of a binary tree the tag resides on. When queried, a blocker tag responds with a ‘0’ and a ‘1’ bit. This causes the reader to start over and explore the entire tree.

Such a tag could be programmed to block only a certain range of RFID serial numbers. This would still allow for benign uses of RFID tags while enabling users or corporations to control which tags are readable.

Cheap network devices with embedded IP addresses

Flawed Routers Flood University of Wisconsin Internet Time Server:
NetGear equipment (500,000 unique devices observed, 700,000 manufactured) polls at one second intervals until it receives a response from the NTP server, after which it uses a longer poll interval such as one minute, ten minutes, two hours, or 24 hours, depending upon product model and firmware version.

Australian IT – Rogue routers cause havoc for CSIRO (Kate Mackenzie, JULY 08, 2003): about 85,000 SMC brand routers poll the CSIRO time server twice a minute when they don’t receive a response.

IT security in energy sector to come under scrutiny

IT security in energy sector to come under scrutiny:

Officials from the House Committee on Government Reform want to study the security of the national power grid’s cyber-based control systems. The concern is that an equally devastating series of failures could be triggered by relatively minor disruptions to the control systems that manage the power grid.


The issue came to the forefront during the California energy crisis in 2001. For 17 days, between 25 April and 11 May, hackers managed to remain undetected after they breached the network of the California Independent System Operator (ISO), which manages that state’s electric grid. Although no damage was reported, officials traced the intrusion back to a system in China.


The problem, however, is that electrical grids such as California ISOs are highly integrated and dependent on other regional grids, and all are managed using technology known as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. Once highly proprietary, SCADA systems are, increasingly, being deployed using commercial off-the-shelf technologies that rely on public internet protocols and connections for ease of management and cost savings, experts said.

Traffic Waves

This page gets rediscovered by the digerati every few years:
SCIENCE HOBBYIST: Traffic Waves, physics for bored commuters, by William Beaty.
It’s got great little animated traffic images, and a continuing intelligent discussion.

konspire2b compared to other systems

konspire2b is
a sender-oriented push P2P content distribution system.
Blogs will need to do something like this to scale distribution of RSS files; polling for RSS updates is not sustainable.
The authors recently posted
comparisons to Gnutella, Freenet, and BitTorrent (received-oriented pull content distributioin systems).

[via Slashdot | A Blog With Unlimited Bandwidth (Beta 1.2)]

Reputation

Ed Felten
comments on copyright owners flooding P2P networks with bogus data:

… my prediction is that at least some file-sharing vendors will try adopting reputation systems, and that after a few false starts they will find a way to make those systems at least modestly successful to combating decoy tactics …

and I cannot help but correlate this to the other network (SMTP email) being flooded with bogus data (spam), and, lo, by coincidence,
yesterday’s
TRIPOLI proposal from Lauren Weinstein’s proposal that can be roughly be described (my words) as web-of-trust or certification-of-reputation, applied to email.

Internet2 NetFlow Weekly and Daily Reports Available

Internet2 NetFlow Weekly Reports:

NetFlow data from all core routers of the Abilene network are analyzed
to produce weekly reports of use of the network. In essence, this is a weekly
version of the “Bulk TCP Use
and Performance on Internet2”
by
Stanislav Shalunov and

Benjamin Teitelbaum
(note, however, that the paper used one day of data while the reports
use a week of data each and that the paper used data from the busiest
router while the reports present a network-wide view).

The reports are produced automatically using programs written by
Anatoly Karp and
Stanislav Shalunov.
The CWEB program nfstat.w
reads large daily files and produces intermediate results that are
further digested by a collection of Perl programs.

Major vendors tighten WLAN security

Major vendors tighten WLAN security
Oct 17, 2001 CNET

As part of the 802.1x standard, which has been approved but not implemented within 802.11b, the Windows XP client natively supports Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP), which provides dynamic, session-specific wireless encryption keys, central user administration via specialized third-party Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) servers, and mutual authentication between client and Access Point (AP) and AP to RADIUS server.

Windows XP is also compatible with EAP-Transport Level Security (EAP-TLS), which uses digital certificates for authentication. Windows XP’s integration of these features will significantly ease deployment of EAP solutions because separate client utilities will no longer be necessary. These capabilities will reduce the risk involved in using 802.11b within a corporate network.

Practical Network Support for IP Traceback