Author Archives: mea

Crack in Internet’s foundation of trust allows HTTPS session hijacking

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The technique exploits web sessions protected by the Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Layer Security protocols when they use one of two data-compression schemes designed to reduce network congestion or the time it takes for webpages to load. Short for Compression Ratio Info-leak Made Easy, CRIME works only when both the browser and server support TLS compression or SPDY, an open networking protocol used by both Google and Twitter. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers are all believed to be immune to the attack, but at time of writing smartphone browsers and a myriad of other applications that rely on TLS are believed to remain vulnerable.

via Crack in Internet’s foundation of trust allows HTTPS session hijacking | Ars Technica.

A side effect of compression, security experts have long known, is that it leaks clues about the encrypted contents. That means it provides a “side channel” to adversaries who have the ability to monitor the data. A research paper published in 2002 by John Kelsey looks eerily similar to CRIME, but only in retrospect.

How Google Cools Its Armada of Servers

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Here’s how the airflow works: The temperature in the data center is maintained at 80 degrees, somewhat warmer than in most data centers. That 80-degree air enters the server, inlet and passes across the components, becoming warmer as it removes the heat. Fans in the rear of the chassis guide the air into an enclosed hot aisle, which reaches 120 degrees as hot air enters from rows of racks on either side. As the hot air rises to the top of the chamber, it passes through the cooling coil and is cooled to room temperature, and then exhausted through the top of the enclosure. The flexible piping connects to the cooling coil at the top of the hot aisle and descends through an opening in the floor and runs under the raised floor.

via How Google Cools Its Armada of Servers » Data Center Knowledge.

Google’s custom servers also have a bare bones look and feel, with components exposed for easy access as they slide in and out of racks. This provides easy access for admins who need to replace components, but also avoids the cost of cosmetic trappings common to OEM servers.

Polar Mobile arms publishers with MediaEverywhere HTML5 tool

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MediaEverywhere provides publishers with an SDK based on HTML5 that allows them to create custom mobile websites in a short period of time but also re-use the work for native apps for smartphones and tablets. The SDK allows publishers to control the look of their content while easily distributing it to multiple devices in a cost-effective way.

via Polar Mobile arms publishers with MediaEverywhere HTML5 tool — Tech News and Analysis.

And he said mobile consumption is increasingly moving to the web browser. Pew reported earlier this month that 60 perecnt of tablet news users rely on their browser to get news on their tablet, compared to 23 percent that mostly use apps.

Fabbing a chip that could encode data in a twisted vortex of light

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Photons possess a number of quantum properties that can be used to encode information. You can think of photon polarization as like the rotation of a planet on its axis. In this view, the helical shape of the light wave—known as its orbital angular momentum (OAM)—is akin to the planet’s orbit around the Sun. These properties are independent of each other, and of the wavelength of light, so they can be manipulated separately. Whereas polarization occurs as a combination of two possible orientations, the OAM theoretically can have infinite values, though in practice far fewer states are available. Nevertheless, exploiting OAM greatly expands the potentially exploitable quantum states of photons we could put to use.

via Fabbing a chip that could encode data in a twisted vortex of light | Ars Technica.

The Honeynet Project

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The HoneyMap shows a real-time visualization of attacks against the Honeynet Project’s sensors deployed around the world. It leverages the internal data sharing protocol hpfeeds as its data source. Read this post to learn about the technical details and frequently asked questions. Before going into explanations, take a look at the map itself: map.honeynet.org!

via Blogs | The Honeynet Project.

The Future of Mobile News

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Half of all U.S. adults now have a mobile connection to the web through either a smartphone or tablet, significantly more than a year ago, and this has major implications for how news will be consumed and paid for, according to a detailed new survey of news use on mobile devices by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) in collaboration with The Economist Group.

via The Future of Mobile News – Pew Research Center.

News remains an important part of what people do on their mobile devices-64% of tablet owners and 62% of smartphone owners say they use the devices for news at least weekly, tying news statistically with other popular activities such email and playing games on tablets and behind only email on smartphones (not including talking on the phone). This means fully a third of all U.S. adults now get news on a mobile device at least once a week.

What Penetration Testers Find Inside Your Network

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Why is network segmentation so important? “Today, there is still more focus on the perimeter than on internal network segmentation. Network engineers don’t realize that one successful social engineering or client-side attack could mean ‘game over’ once the attacker has that foothold,” Sanders says. Segmentation based on asset importance and level of trust is one of the most effective ways to prevent many of the attacks advanced attackers — and even himself — perform once inside a target network, he says.

via Tech Insight: What Penetration Testers Find Inside Your Network – Dark Reading.

Twitter, PayPal reveal database performance

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Cole revealed that Twitter’s MySQL database handles some huge numbers — three million new rows per day, the storage of 400 million tweets per day replicated four times over — but it is managed by a team of only six full-time administrators and a sole MySQL developer.

via Twitter, PayPal reveal database performance – Software – Technology – News – iTnews.com.au.

Daniel Austin, a technology architect at Paypal, has built a globally-distributed database with 100 terabytes of user-related data, also based on a MySQL cluster.

Austin said he was charged with building a system with 99.999 percent availability, without any loss of data, an ability to support transactions (and roll them back), and an ability to write data to the database and read it anywhere else in the world in under one second.

20 Iptables Examples For New SysAdmins

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This Linux based firewall is controlled by the program called iptables to handles filtering for IPv4, and ip6tables handles filtering for IPv6. I strongly recommend that you first read our quick tutorial that explains how to configure a host-based firewall called Netfilter (iptables) under CentOS / RHEL / Fedora / Redhat Enterprise Linux. This post list most common iptables solutions required by a new Linux user to secure his or her Linux operating system from intruders.

Via Linux: 20 Iptables Examples For New SysAdmins.

Docsis 3.1 Targets 10-Gig Downstream

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ORLANDO — SCTE Cable-Tec Expo — The Docsis 3.1 platform will support capacities of at least 10Gbit/s downstream and 1Gbit/s upstream, a move that will certainly prolong the industry’s need to deploy fiber all the way to the home.

via Light Reading Cable – Cable – Docsis 3.1 Targets 10-Gig Downstream – Telecom News Analysis.

To hit its capacity targets, the cable industry wants to increase its spectral efficiency by about 50 percent. As expected, the new specs will do away with 6MHz- and 8MHz-wide channel spacing and instead use smaller (20KHz-to-50KHz-wide) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) subcarriers; these can be bonded inside a block spectrum that could end up being about 200MHz wide. (See Docsis 3.1 Will Change Cable’s Data Channels.)

The definition of ofdm from wiki.

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a method of encoding digital data on multiple carrier frequencies. OFDM has developed into a popular scheme for widebanddigital communication, whether wireless or over copper wires, used in applications such as digital television and audio broadcasting, DSLbroadband internet access, wireless networks, and 4G mobile communications.

And the primary advantage using ofdm is:

The primary advantage of OFDM over single-carrier schemes is its ability to cope with severe channel conditions (for example, attenuation of high frequencies in a long copper wire, narrowband interference and frequency-selective fading due to multipath) without complex equalization filters.  Channel equalization is simplified because OFDM may be viewed as using many slowly modulated narrowband signals rather than one rapidly modulated wideband signal.