Networks

Cyber Security and the White House, Part 2 - Cyberwarfare

This is a follow-up to my previous post on Cybersecurity and the White House. It illustrates an actual cyberwarfare attack against Estonia in 2007 and how it can be a legitimate national security issue. Estonia is one of the most wired countries in eastern Europe. In spite of its status of being a former Soviet republic, it relies on the internet for a substantial portion of everyday life -- communications, financial transactions, news, shopping and restaurant reservations all use the Internet. Indeed, in 2000, the Estonian government declared Internet access a basic human right...

Cyber Security and the White House

A few months ago, an article appeared on arstechnica.com asking the question "Should cybersecurity be managed from the White House?" During the recent presidential elections in the United States and the federal elections in Canada, the two major players in both parties had differing views that crossed borders. In the US, the McCain campaign tended to favor free market solutions to the problem of cybersecurity, and the Conservatives in Canada took a similar position...

IPv6… Canada About to Score?

USA-Canada World Championship hockey games never fail to elicit great excitement. In the IPv6 adoption world league however, the US seems to have a convincing lead over their northern neighbour but the game is not over yet, here come the Canucks. Internet evolution, and IPv6 in particular, were the major themes at the ISACC (ICT Standards Advisory Council of Canada) Plenary meeting in Ottawa mid April...

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009

Four senators (Rockefeller, Bayh, Nelson, and Snowe) have recently introduced S.773, the Cybersecurity Act of 2009. While there are some good parts to the bill, many of the substantive provisions are poorly thought out at best. The bill attempts to solve non-problems, and to assume that research results can be commanded into being by virtue of an act of Congress. Beyond that, there are parts of the bill whose purpose is mysterious, or whose content bears no relation to its title.

Traffic Management: An Undefined Term

In Europe yet another package is discussed, and it includes issues related to what I guess one could call Network Neutrality. And, as usual, at the end of the game, texts are negotiated that does not have much meaning in reality. Negotiations on what words imply, while I as an engineer have absolutely no idea what either of the parties actually mean...

Will ENUM Deliver?

ENUM (E.164 NUmber Mapping) is a technology that has been around for a little while that has promised much and, so far, delivered little to the average user. As Nominet has recently been awarded the contract to administer the UK 4.4.e164.arpa delegation, I thought it was time that I put my thoughts on this subject down in writing. I'm going to cover the potential of ENUM in the telecoms industry and what it could mean to you, along with how it is currently being used and what potential security issues surround ENUM.

Designing Secure Networks with Cisco Technology, Part 4

In this multipart series I will be presenting some of the leading industry-standard best practices for enterprise network security using Cisco technologies... In Part 3 of this series I began to discuss Cisco technologies as a standard for enterprise data security. In this article we take a look at how Cisco firewall and packet filtering technologies can be used at the network perimeter to enhance enterprise security.

DPI is Not a Four-Letter Word!

As founder and CTO of Ellacoya Networks, a pioneer in Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), and now having spent the last year at Arbor Networks, a pioneer in network-based security, I have witnessed first hand the evolution of DPI. It has evolved from a niche traffic management technology to an integrated service delivery platform. Once relegated to the dark corners of the central office, DPI has become the network element that enables subscriber opt-in for new services, transparency of traffic usage and quotas, fairness during peak busy hours and protection from denial of service attacks, all the while protecting and maintaining the privacy of broadband users. Yet, DPI still gets a bad rap...

WiMAX vs. LTE

Mobile WiMAX, with the release of 2×2 MIMO chips in 2008, gives WiMAX a lead of two or so years on its major competitor -- the 3GPP's LTE. However, 3G cellphones using 3GPP UMTS technologies, extended to higher speeds with HSPA, is widely used in handsets in many countries. In North America, 3GPP2 CDMA2000 and EV-DO are widely used, but these are likely to be replaced over time by LTE and to some extent WiMAX.

More Cracks Appearing in Mobile Market

When I wrote the BuddeComm analysis on the introduction of Apple's iPhone I commented that the most significant element of this event was that it would begin to create cracks in the flawed business models of the mobile operators, who are desperately hanging on to their closed networks very much like the fixed operators were fighting tooth and nail against opening up their networks. We have seen that the fixed operators have largely lost this battle and we predict that the future of the mobile networks will be no different...