Computing – Page 10

DNSSEC and Route53

DNS is one of the last insecure protocols in use. Since 1983 it has helped identify resources on the Internet, with a name space and a hierarchy based upon a common agreed root.

Your local device – your laptop, your phone, your smart TV – whatever you’re using to read this article – typically has been configured with a local DNS resolver that, when your device needs to look up an address, it can ask the local resolver to go find the answer to a query.

The protocol used by your local device to the resolver, and from the resolver to reach out across the Internet, is an unencrypted protocol. It normally runs on UDP port 53, switching to TCP 53 under certain conditions.

There is no privacy across either your local network, or the wider Internet, of what records are being looked up or the responses coming back.

There’s also no validation that the response sent back to the Resolver IS the correct answer. And malicious actors may try to spuriously send invalid responses to your upstream resolver. For example, I could get my laptop on the same WiFi as you, and send UDP packets to the configured resolver telling it that the response to “www.bank.com” is my address, in order to get you to then connect to a fake service I am running, and try and get some data from you (like your username and password). Hopefully your bank is using HTTPS, and the certificate warning you would likely get would be enough to stop you from entering information that I would get.

The solution to this was to use digital signatures (not encryption) to have a verification of the DNS response received by the Upstream resolver from across the Internet. And thus DNSSEC was in born 1997 (23 years ago as at 2020).

The take up has been slow.

Part of this has been the need for each component of a DNS name – each zone – needing to deploy a DNSSEC-capable DNS server to generate the signatures, and then to have each domain be signed.

The public DNS root was signed in 2010, along with some of the original Top Level Domains. Today the Wikipedia page for the Internet TLDs shows a large number of them are signed and ready for their customers to have their DNS domains return DNSSEC results.

Since 2012 US Government agencies have been required by NIST to deploy DNSSEC, but most years agencies opt out of this. Its been too difficult, or the DNS software or service they are using to host their Domain does not support it.

Two parts to DNS SEC

One the one side, the operator of the zone being looked up (and their parent domain) all need to support and have established a chain-of-trust for DNSSEC. If you turn on DNSSEC for your authoritative domain, then those clients who are not validating the responses won’t see any difference.

Separately, the client side DNS Resolver (often deployed by your ISP, Telco, or network provider) needs to understand and validate the DNSSEC Response. If they turn on DNSSEC for your Resolver, then there’s no impact for resolving domains that don’t support DNSSEC.

Both of these need to be in place to offer some form of protection for DNS spoofing, cache poisoning or other attacks.

Route 53 Support for DNSSEC

In December 2020, Route53 finally announced support for DNSSEC, after many years and many customer requests. And this support comes in two ways.

Firstly, there is now a tick box to enable the VPC-provided resolver to validate DNSSEC entries, if they are received. Its either on, or off at this stage.

And separately, for hosted DNS Zones (your domains), you can now enable DNSSEC and have signed responses sent by Route53 for queries to your DNS entries, so they can be validated.

A significant caveat right now (Dec 2020) for hosted zones is that this doesn’t support the customer Route53 ALIAS record type, used for defining custom names for CloudFront Distributions.

DNSSEC Considerations: VPC Resolver

You probably should enable DNSSEC for your VPC resolvers, particularly if you want additional verification that you aren’t being spoofed. There appears to be no additional cost for this, so the only consideration is why not?

The largest risk comes from misconfiguration of the domain names that you are looking up.

In January 2018, the US Government had a shut down due to blocked legislation. Staff walked off the job, and for some of those agencies, they had DNS SEC Deployed – and for at least one of those agencies, its DNS keys expired, rendering their entire domain off-line (many other let their web site TLS certificates expire, causing warnings for browsers, but email still worked for them for example).

So, you should weigh up the improvement in security posture, versus the risk of an interruption through misconfiguration.

In order to enable it, go to the Route53 Console, and navigate to Resolvers -> VPCs.

ChoOse the VPC Resolver, and scroll to the bottom of the page where you’ll see the below check box.

DNSSEC Considerations: Your Hosted Zones

As a managed service, Route53 normally handles all maintenance and operational activities for you. Serving your records with DNSSEC at least gives your customers the opportunity to validate responses (as they enable their validation).

I’d suggest that this is a good thing. However, with the caveat around CloudFront ALIAS records right now, I am choosing not to rush to production hosted zones today, but staying on my non-production and non-mission critical zones.

I have always said that your non-production environments should be a leading indicator of the security that will get to production (at some stage), so this approach aligns with this.

The long term impact of Route53 DNSSEC

Route5 is a strategic service that enables customers to not need their own allocate fixed address space and run their own DNS servers (many of which never receive enough security maintenance and updates). With DNSSEC support this means that barriers for adoption are reduced, and indeed, I feel we’ll see an up-tick in DNSSEC deployment worldwide because of this capability coming to Route53.

Other Approaches

An alternate security mechanism being tested now is called DNS over HTTPS, or -DoH. This encrypts the DNS names being requested from the local network provider (they still see the IP addresses being accessed).

In corporate settings, DoH is frowned upon, as many corporate It departments want to inspect and protect staff by blocking certain content at the DNS level (eg, block all lookups for betting sites) – and hiding this in DoH may prevent this.

In the end, a resolver somewhere knows which client looked up what address.

What does a 2nd AWS Region for Australia mean to the Australian IT Industry?

I was there launching the 1st AWS Region in Sydney in 2013 as an AWS staff member, and as the AWS Solution Architect with a focus (depth) on security meant that it was a critical time for customers who were looking to meet strict (or perhaps, even stricter) security requirements.

Back in 2013, the question was the US Patriot Act. That concern and question has long gone.

Subsequently came cost effectiveness. Then domestic IRAP PROTECTED status.

And back in 2013, secrecy was everything about a Region. We launched Sydney the day it was announced, as ready-for-service. This made recruiting operational staff, securing data centre space (or even building data centres), and having large amounts of fibre run between buildings by contractors, difficult to keep under wraps. These days, pre-announcements like this help ease the struggle to execute the deployment without the need for code names and secrecy.

So, what does the launch of a second AWS Region in Australia, with three Availability Zones, and the general set of services within AWS being present, going to mean to the domestic and international markets?

Proximity to customers & revenue

Let’s look at some population and revenue statistics for these few cities in Australia (and use NZ as a comparison):

Locality	Population 2018	% population of Australia	Gross State Product 2018/19 (USD$B)
All of Australia	25M	100%	1,462 (100%)
NSW (Sydney)	7.5M (5.2M)	30% (20.8%)	482 (32%)
Victoria (Melbourne)	6.3M (4.9M)	25.2% (19.6%)	344 (23%)
New Zealand (for comparison)	4.8M	19.2%	209 (14%)

Population comparisons in AN/Z

So with a Melbourne Region launch, we see 55.2% of the Australian population in the same state as a Region, and 40.4% in the same city as a Region. This also represents being close to where 55% of the GDP of Australia comes from.

Moreover this is coverage for where the headquarters of most Australian national organisations are based, and typically their IT departments are helmed from their national HQ.

Where does Latency matter?

The main industry that will see the latency impact from the new Melbourne Region is probably the video/media production vertical. There’s a sizable video media production industry in Melbourne that will now not discount AWS for the 11ms or so that was previously seen to Sydney.

Of course, latency doesn’t imply bandwidth.

Melbourne has been a Direct Connect location for some time, with customers able to take a partial port, or a whole 1GB or 10 GB port, and multiples three of with Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) to deliver higher throughputs.

But the latency remained. And thus the Big Fat Pipe Problem would be a consideration: the amount of data sitting IN the pipe since transmission, and before being confirmed as received on the other end. For some devices and TCP/IP stacks, as the bandwidth increases, this becomes a problem.

You canna change the laws of physics
Mr Scott, Enterprise

Then there are applications that make multiple sequential connections from on-cloud to on-premises. An application that opens perhaps 100 SQL connections to a remote database over 11ms latency in series will see three round trips of TCP/IP handshake, and perhaps a TLS 1.2 handshake of 3 round trips, for 6.6 seconds of wall time before any actual query data and response is sent and processed.

The death of Multi-Cloud in Australia

Despite extremely strong multiple-Availability Zone architectures (see the Well-Architected principles), the noise of “multi-Region” has escalated in the industry. From the AWS-customer perspective, multi-cloud has become recognised as a “how about me” call from desperate competitors.

Of course the complexity of multi-cloud is huge, and not understood by most (any?) CIO who endorses this strategy. It’s far better to get the best out of one cloud provider, rather than try and dilute your talent base across implementing, maintaining and securing more than one.

However, some industry regulators have demanded more than one Region for some workloads, again mostly as a lack of understanding of what a strong Well-Architected design looks like.

With this announcement, multi-Region domestically within Australia will be a reality.

But we’re a Melbourne based infrastructure provider, we’re local!!

Sorry, time’s up.

You’re about to lose your customers, and your staff to an unstoppable force, with easy on-boarding, pay as you go, no commitment required terms.

It’s self-service, so there’s no cost of sale.

It’s commodity.

And it’s innovating at a clip far faster than any infrastructure organisation around. There’s almost nothing special about your offering that isn’t faster, cheaper and better in cloud. It’s time to work out what happens when 1/2 your staff leave, and 1/2 your customers are gone.

Getting customers to sign a 5 year contract at this point is only going to sound like entrapment.

Where next in Australia & NZ?

There’s a lot to consider when planning an AWS Region.

First, their are tax & legal overheads in establishing multiple entities in a country to implement, operate and own infrastructure. That means that even if New Zealand was next in line by population, or GDP, it may fall to another location in Australia to follow Melbourne.

And while the state of Queensland may look like it’s third, the latency it already has between Brisbane and Sydney of around 17ms may be outweighed by the fourth in the pack, Western Australia at 50ms.

Lots of variables and weightings to consider. And despite all of this, we have some time to see what the customer cost for AWS resources will be in the new Melbourne Region when it becomes available.

UniFi: Should I wait for the next DreamMachine Pro?

I switched to a 1 Gb/s NBN connection a few months back, but it soon became apparent that the original Unifi Security Gateway (USG) is no match for 1 Gb/s link.

While I love the Wifi access points, the management interface, and the rapid firmware updates, throughput limitations of the USG only became noticeable when the link speed went up. Ubiquity Networks, the manufacturers of the Unifi range, has released faster products – the throughput being the major selling point. And of course, the pricing goes up accordingly.

But in thinking of the current top-of-the-line device, the DreamMachine Pro, it kind of gives me some pause for consideration.

The device has two “WAN links”; one is an RJ45 gigabit Ethernet port, the other is a 10Gb/s SFP slot for a fibre GBIC. I’d love to have a fail-over Internet connection, but the fibre connection isn’t an advantage to me.

Ubiquiti are not selling their LTE fail-over device in Australia. I’d have to drop the 10 Gb/s SFP port back to a vanilla 1 Gb/s RJ34 copper port to plug into an alternate LTE device. But then again, carrier plans for this pattern are expensive.

However, it could be that I have two RJ45 Internet connections; my NBN connection affords me up to 4 ISP connections in the fiber-to-the-premesis that I have available. Now, the upstream link from my CPE to the Point of Interconnect (PoI) may be limited to 1 GB, but having the ability to fail-over to another ISP may be useful. Or I may ant to route traffic by port or Service to a different link (eg, VPN traffic over Link #2, or Web Traffic over Link #2, or perhaps just streaming video from some specific providers over alternate link.).

The Dream Machine also has a built in 8 port switch (EJ45), but none of the ports are Power over Ethernet (POE). After all, the majority of links going in to this are going to be WiFi access points directly, and linking an 8 port PoE switch in here seems a waste. A long tail of customers would find this fills their needs without having additional switches to worry about.

I would also have expected more ports here, given the cost of the device: say 16 ports, even if only half of them were PoE.

The inclusion of Protect for video cameras is a neat idea, but having two local disks to RAID together would be nice. I have shied away form on=premise storage, but for large volumes of video, I still like having the highest bandwidth version not traversing the WAN. So Its great we have one disk option available, but it could be so much more awesome if we just had some local resilience.

Of course, if Japan has residential 2 Gb/sec Internet connection, then would this device still be usable? I’m guessing Australia will max out on 1 Gb/sec for a while…

So, trying to decide if I dive in for the current DreamMachine Pro, or wait until it’s tweaked…..

“Well Maintained”

I touched on this in a recent article, but I wanted to dive deeper on this.

AWS makes much about Well-Architected principles, something I worked on the early stages of circa 2013, and applied to $work. I strongly recommend anyone deploying to any cloud provider think about these principles and their responsibility in implementing these, or in ensuring they are implemented.

Around the same time (2013/2014), the term DevOps and the rise of CI/CD pipelines was also coming to the fore. Looking back, the biggest advantage that Well-Architected lent on DevOps for was the ability to make rapid, incremental improvements to an architecture.

Poor architectural implementations traditionally went unchanged during he lifecycle of the deployed solution. Poor software would eventually be replaced in a follow up project; replaced with massive fanfare and budget.

So while Well-Architected starts a project, the concept of Well Maintained is the constant re-application of Well-Architected to a workload post go-live. It’s also the rapid adoption of software patches throughout the stack: the database version, the SDKs and libraries in the code base, the uplift of runtime versions (such as Java 8 -> 11, and beyond), the enabling of new TLS protocols and sun-setting of the old (TLS 1.3 turned on, TLS <= 1.1 turned off at this time).

A project that always adopts the current version of SDKs, and is always in good compliance with current best practice over time is Well Maintained. It’s almost evergreen. Its ages well – in the fact it doesn’t really age.

How can you tell if something is Well-Maintained?

Check the versions of its components. Dive deep. Find out what prevents you from updating these items. Find the known vulnerabilities in the versions between what your project has now, and the current released version.

Evolution of Compute: Physical to Serverless

Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ve seen the impact that Hyperscale Public Cloud has made on the IT industry. Its invention wasn’t to be a thing, but to be a continually evolving, improving thing.

And while many organisations will use SaaS platforms, those platforms themselves often run atop the IaaS and PaaS platforms of a hyperscale cloud platform.

One person’s SaaS is another person’s IaaS.
Me, James Bromberger

But its worth just checking on the evolution of IT service delivery at a low level, for not everyone who is in the IT industry has seen what that looks like at this time.

Evolution of service delivery from Physical servers to Serverless.

Change is hard. Humans are bad at it. I’ve seen many who evolved from column 1 to column 2, and have felt they are “done”. They aren’t on-board for the next wave of the evolution.

I suffer from this too. But three is a short cut that I can offer: try to jump from where you are now, to as far to the right as you can in one step.

Every one of these phases is a monumental shift in the way that services are delivered, requiring training, and experience. There is an overhead knowledge baggage that engineers take with them, trying to work out what functions the same as before, and what is different. This is taxing, stressful, and unpleasant.

So rather than repeat this process in sequence, over years for each change, my recommendation is to see how far to the right you can jump. Some limitations will crop up that prevent you from leap-frogging all the way to Serverless, but that’s OK. Other services will not be thus constrained.

Well Architected, meet Well Maintained

In 2012, the Well Architected concept was born inside AWS. It is a set of principles that helps lead to success in the Cloud; at that time, that was the AWS EC2 environment. It’s well worth a read if you have not seen it. At this time, its also been adopted my Microsoft for the Azure environment as well.

However, I want to move your attention from Architecture time, to operations time.

If you look at the traditional total life-cycle activities, there’s a lot of time and effort spent learning, adjusting, and implementing supporting technologies that are starting to become invisible in the Serverless world.

Lets look at the operational activities done in a physical environment, and compare that to Serverless. I’ll skip the middle phases of evolution as shown above:

Activity	Physical	Serverless
Physical security	Required	Managed
Physical installation	Required	Managed
Capacity Planning	Required	Managed
Network switching	Required	Managed
Hardware power planning	Required	Managed
Physical cooling	Required	Managed
Hardware procurement	Required	Managed
Hardware firmware updates	Required	Managed
OS installation	Required	Managed
OS patching	Required	Managed
OS upgrade	Required	Managed
OS licensing	Often Required	Managed
Runtime selection	Required	Required
Runtime minor patching	Required	Managed
Runtime major version upgrade	Required	Required
App server selection	Required	Managed
App server minor patching	Required	Managed
App server major version upgrade	Required	Managed
Code base maintenance	Required	Required
Code base 3rd party library updates (SDKs)	Required	Required
Network encryption protocol and cipher upgrades (TLS, etc)	Required	Required

As you can see, a large number of activities that should be done regularly to ensure operational excellence. However, I am yet to see a traditional physical environment, or virtualised on-prem environment that actively does all of the above well.

It’s an easy test: wander into any Java environment, and ask what version of the Java runtime is deployed in production. The typical response is “we updated to Java 8 two years ago“. What that means if “we haven’t touched the exact deployed version of Java for two years“.

Likewise, ask what version of Windows Server is deployed? Anything older than 2016 (even that, with 2019 has been out for nearly 2 years at this time is generous) shows a lack of agility and maintenance.

I challenge those in IT operations to think through the above table and check the last time their service updated each row – post project launch. If its a poor show, the change is your in “support mode”, and not “DevOps Operations”.

So what can be done to help do this maintenance?

Take it away. Stop it. While it can be argued to be important, and interesting, you’re possibly better off spending that effort on the smaller list that remains in a Serverless environment.

Evolution Continues

We can’t see where this evolution will go next. We do see that identity, authentication, authorisation, in-flight encryption, remain key elements to be aware of.

What comes next, I can’t predict. I know many ideas will be thrown about, new or recycled, and some will work, while others will wither and disappear again.

The only constant in life is change.
Heraclitus, b. 565 BC