Security

For decades, IT security has relied on the “castle-and-moat” model: a strong perimeter designed to keep threats out, assuming everything inside is trusted. This perimeter-focused strategy is familiar and relatively convinient, but in an era where a single compromised workload can unravel an entire infrastructure, it’s a catastrophic negligence. The core issue is that this model is blind to the modern battlefield. A workload, broadly defined as the resources and processes needed to run an application, such as hosts, virtual machines, and containers, drives the majority of communication in today’s data centers. According to industry analysis, east-west traffic now accounts for over 80% of data center communication. This internal traffic is invisible to perimeter defenses, creating a vast, unprotected space where attackers can move laterally after a single breach. Microsegmentation is the modern approach designed to secure this internal territory. Here are four impactful truths about this transformative technology. ...

What if a simple packet(s) could bring down the internet? In the world of TCP/IP, vulnerabilities like SYN flood attacks have threatened network stability for decades. This deep dive explores the ingenious mitigation known as TCP SYN cookies, from the basics of TCP state management to its pragmatic trade-offs and lessons for modern engineering. Transmission Control Block The Transmission Control Block (TCB) is a critical data structure created when a TCP entity opens a TCP connection. A TCB contains the whole state of the connection and must maintain all information required to send and receive segments. ...