What am I talking about? The first Turris Omnia routers, of course! By this moment, the first routers should be unpacked and pleasing their new owners. Not many of our projects in CZ.NIC brought us as much joy and as many troubles at the same time. The joy came right at the beginning. First prototypes were finished in record time. Tests showed that despite the great performance and a significant number of connectors we managed to maintain a very compact size and reasonable consumption. Naturally, the main joy came when during our Indiegogo campaign, we collected the required amount of USD 100,000 in less than 24 hours (the total amount as of today is almost twelvefold). The reception in the world media was also great.
Version 1.1 of YANG language is out
A complete specification of the new 1.1 version of the YANG data modelling language was published as RFC 7950 on the last day of August. After a relatively slow start, in the last two years the use of YANG has been steadily increasing not only in the IETF but also in other standard development organisations such as IEEE or BBF, and also in the industry. Nowadays, YANG is regarded as a fundamental tool for secure remote administration of network devices and services. It becomes clear that standard and machine-readable data models of configuration and state data – that is, definition of their structure, data types and semantic rules – are ultimately more important than the concrete management protocol that is used for transmitting and editing the data. Despite some reluctance on the side of equipment vendors who love their proprietary CLIs, especially operators of large and heterogeneous networks have been pressing hard to make the management data as standard and cross-platform as possible.
Telnet is not dead – at least not on ‘smart’ devices
Depending on your age, you either might or might not have used Telnet to connect to remote computers in the past. But regardless of your age, you would probably not consider Telnet for anything you currently use. SSH has become the de facto standard when it comes to remote shell connection as it offers higher security, data encryption and much more besides.
Knot Resolver 1.1.0
Knot Resolver 1.1.0 is out and it brings several notable features.
The promising career of a young detective
Several major changes has already took place in the detective world of Tablexia this year, and because we’re going at full throttle, here are some more of them!
DNSSEC signing with Knot DNS and YubiKey
Knot DNS 2.1 introduced support for DNSSEC signing using PKCS #11. PKCS #11 (also called Cryptoki) is a standard interface to access various Hardware Security Modules (HSM). Such devices are usually used to improve protection of private key material. The interface is rather flexible and gives the HSM vendors huge amount of freedom, which unfortunately makes its use a bit tricky. There are often surprising differences between individual implementations.
Turris Omnia campaign enters a new phase
It is hard to believe, but it is almost half a year since the Omnia campaign started on Indiegogo. In that time, much has changed. Most importantly, we now know that there is a place on the market for a high-end open-source router – we have one million US dollars to prove it :).
The most significant attacks addressed by security teams in the Danube region
On March 15, 2016, the concluding conference of the project “Cyber security in the Danube region” (CS Danube) took place. The main objective of the project joined by representatives of security teams and organizations from Croatia, Austria, Slovakia, Serbia and Moldova, as well as our team CSIRT.CZ, was to strengthen the capacity of individual teams and cooperation in cyber security.
Turris Omnia and openSUSE
About two weeks ago I was on the annual openSUSE Board face to face meeting. It was great and you can read reports of what was going on in there on openSUSE project mailing list. In this post I would like to focus on my other agenda I had while coming to Nuremberg. Nuremberg is among other things SUSE HQ and therefore there is a high concentration of skilled engineers and I wanted to take an advantage of that…