Administrating

The National Internet Segment Reliability Research explains how the outage of a single Autonomous System might affect the connectivity of the impacted region with the rest of the world. Most of the time, the most critical AS in the region is the dominant ISP on the market, but not always.

As the number of alternate routes between AS’s increases (and do not forget that the Internet stands for “interconnected network” — and each network is an AS), so does the fault-tolerance and stability of the Internet across the globe. Although some paths are from the beginning more important than others, establishing as many alternate routes as possible is the only viable way to ensure an adequately robust network.

The global connectivity of any given AS, regardless of whether it is an international giant or regional player, depends on the quantity and quality of its path to Tier-1 ISPs.

Usually, Tier-1 implies an international company offering global IP transit service over connections with other Tier-1 providers. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that such connectivity will be maintained all the time. For many ISPs at all “tiers”, losing connection to just one Tier-1 peer would likely render them unreachable from some parts of the world.

It's been two years since we last checked the code of the LLVM project with PVS-Studio, so let's see if PVS-Studio is still the leader among tools for detecting bugs and security weaknesses. We'll do that by scanning the LLVM 8.0.0 release for new bugs.

Once I put on true wireless headphones and all the cables after that (even if it's a flexible headband on a “wireless” headset), became annoying. So I’ve tried a lot of AirPods-like earbuds in order to find the best ones. In 2018 aside from the AirPods themselves I tried: Jabra Elite 65+, Samsung IconX 2018 and Sony WF-1000X. The result was a neat table with all the objective data. Everything else — my personal opinion — let's discuss in the comments.

The Rust ecosystem is still growing. As a result, new libraries with improved functionality are frequently released into the developer community, while older libraries become obsolete. When we initially designed Exonum, we used the Iron web-framework. In this article, we describe how we ported the Exonum framework to actix-web using generic programming.

Nowadays everyone knows about cloud services. Many companies have cracked this market segment and created their own cloud services of various purposes. Recently our team has also been interested in these services in terms of integrating the PVS-Studio code analyzer into them. Chances are, our regular readers have already guessed what type of project we will check this time. The choice fell on the code of Huawei cloud services.

In Mail.ru Group, we have Tarantool, a Lua-based application server and a database united. It's fast and classy, but the resources of a single server are always limited. Vertical scaling is also not the panacea. That is why Tarantool has some tools for horizontal scaling, or the vshard module [1]. It allows you to spread data across multiple servers, but you'll have to tinker with it for a while to configure it and bolt on the business logic.

Good news: we got our share of bumps (for example, [2], [3]) and created another framework, which significantly simplifies the solution to this problem.

Тarantool Cartridge is the new framework for developing complex distributed systems. It allows you to concentrate on writing business logic instead of solving infrastructure problems. Under the cut, I will tell you how this framework works and how it could help in writing distributed services.

This is a new piece of our series of articles about using the PVS-Studio static analyzer with cloud CI systems. Today we are going to look at another service, CircleCI. We'll take the Kodi media player application as a test project and see if we can find any interesting bugs in its source code.

It was an ordinary Thursday on 4.04.2019. Except that at some point of the midday timeline an AS60280 belonging to Belarus’ NTEC leaked 18600 prefixes originating from approximately 1400 ASes.

Those routes were taken from the transit provider RETN (AS9002) and further announced to NTEC’s provider — RU-telecom’s AS205540, which, in its turn, accepted all of them, spreading the leak.

FreeRDP is an open-source implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), a proprietary protocol by Microsoft. The project supports multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux, macOS, and even iOS and Android. We chose it to be the first project analyzed with the static code analyzer PVS-Studio for a series of articles about the checks of RDP-clients.

Hi Habr,

I'm Artyom Karamyshev, a system administration team leader at Mail.Ru Cloud Solutions (MCS). We launched many products in 2019. We've aimed to make API services easily scalable, fault-tolerant, and ready to accommodate rapid growth. Our platform is running on OpenStack, and in this article, I describe all the component fault tolerance issues that we've resolved.

The overall fault tolerance of the platform is consists of its components fault tolerance. So, I'm going to show you step by step tutorial about all levels where we've found the risks.

This is a second article, which focuses on usage of the PVS-Studio analyzer in cloud CI-systems. This time we'll consider the platform Azure DevOps — a cloud CI\CD solution from Microsoft. We'll be analyzing the ShareX project.

Apache Dubbo is one of the most popular Java projects on GitHub. It's not surprising. It was created 8 years ago and is widely applied as a high-performance RPC environment. Of course, most of the bugs in its code have long been fixed and the quality of the code is maintained at a high level. However, there is no reason to opt out of checking such an interesting project using the PVS-Studio static code analyzer. Let's see how it turned out.

TL;DR: starting February 2020, DNS servers that don’t support DNS both over UDP and TCP may stop working.

Bangkok, in general, is a strange place to stay. Of course, it is warm there, rather cheap and some might find the cuisine interesting, along with the fact that about half of the world’s population does not need to apply for a visa in advance to get there. However, you still need to get acquainted with the smells, and the city streets are casting cyberpunk scenes more than anything else.

In particular, a photo to the left has been taken not far from the center of Thailand’ capital city, one street away from the Shangri-La hotel, where the 30th DNS-OARC organization meeting took place on May 12 and 13. It is a non-profit organization dedicated to security, stability, and overall development of the DNS — the Domain Name System.

Slides from the DNS-OARC 30 meeting are recommended for everyone interested in how the DNS works, though perhaps the most interesting is what is absent in those slides. Namely, a 45-minute round table with a discussion around the results of DNS Flag Day 2019, which occurred on February, 1, 2019.

And, the most impressive result of a round table is the decision to repeat DNS Flag Day once again.

While working on the annual report this year we have decided to avoid retelling the news headlines of the previous year and, though it is almost impossible to ignore memories absolutely, we want to share with you the result of a clear thought and a strategic view to the point where we all are going to arrive in the nearest time — the present.

Leaving introduction words behind, here are our key findings:

• Average DDoS attack duration dropped to 2.5 hours;
• During 2018, the capability appeared for attacks at hundreds of gigabits-per-second within a country or region, bringing us to the verge of “quantum theory of bandwidth relativity”;
• The frequency of DDoS attacks continues to grow;
• The continuing growth of HTTPS-enabled (SSL) attacks;
• PC is dead: most of the legitimate traffic today comes from smartphones, which is a challenge for DDoS actors today and would be the next challenge for DDoS mitigation companies;
• BGP finally became an attack vector, 2 years later than we expected;
• DNS manipulation has become the most damaging attack vector;
• Other new amplification vectors are possible, like memcached & CoAP;
• There are no more “safe industries” that are invulnerable to cyberattacks of any kind.

In this article we have tried to cherry-pick all the most interesting parts of our report, though if you would like read the full version in English, the PDF is available.

Hi all!

Every person is using barcodes nowadays, mostly without noticing this. When we are buying the groceries in the store, their identifiers are getting from barcodes. Its also the same with goods in the warehouses, postal parcels and so on. But not so many people actually know, how it works.

What is 'inside' the barcode, and what is encoded on this image?



Lets figure it out, and also lets write our own bar decoder.

That, we must say, is the unique story so far.

Here’s the beginning: for approximately an hour, starting at 19:28 UTC on April 1, 2020, the largest Russian ISP — Rostelecom (AS12389) — was announcing prefixes belonging to prominent internet players: Akamai, Cloudflare, Hetzner, Digital Ocean, Amazon AWS, and other famous names.

Before the issue was resolved, paths between the largest cloud networks were somewhat disrupted — the Internet blinked. The route leak was distributed quite well through Rascom (AS20764), then Cogent (AS174) and in a couple of minutes through Level3 (AS3356) to the world. The issue suddenly became bad enough that it saturated the route decision-making process for a few Tier-1 ISPs.

It looked like this:



With that:

Travis CI is a distributed web service for building and testing software that uses GitHub as a source code hosting service. In addition to the above scripts, you can add your own, thanks to the extensive configuration options. In this article we will set up Travis CI for working with PVS-Studio by the example of PPSSPP code.

TL;DR: Client-server architecture of our internal configuration management tool, QControl.
At its basement, there’s a two-layered transport protocol working with gzip-compressed messages without decompression between endpoints. Distributed routers and endpoints receive the configuration updates, and the protocol itself makes it possible to install intermediary localized relays. It is based on a differential backup (“recent-stable,” explained further) design and employs JMESpath query language and Jinja templating for configuration rendering.

Qrator Labs operates on and maintains a globally distributed mitigation network. Our network is anycast, based on announcing our subnets via BGP. Being a BGP anycast network physically located in several regions across the Earth makes it possible for us to process and filter illegitimate traffic closer to the Internet backbone — Tier-1 operators.

On the other hand, being a geographically distributed network bears its difficulties. Communication between the network points-of-presence (PoP) is essential for a security provider to have a coherent configuration for all network nodes and update it in a timely and cohesive manner. So to provide the best possible service for customers, we had to find a way to synchronize the configuration data between different continents reliably.

In the beginning, there was the Word… which quickly became communication protocol in need of an upgrade.

This article is also available in Russian / Эта статья также доступна на русском языке

The mass market of smartphones without the 3.5 mm audio jack changed headphones industry, wireless Bluetooth headphones have become the main way to listen to music and communicate in headset mode for many users.
Bluetooth device manufacturers rarely disclose detailed product specifications, and Bluetooth audio articles on the Internet are contradictory and sometimes incorrect. They do not tell about all the features, and often publish the same false information.
Let's try to understand the protocol, the capabilities of Bluetooth stacks, headphones and speakers, Bluetooth codecs for music and speech, find out what affects the quality of the transmitted audio and the delay, learn how to capture and decode information about supported codecs and other device features.

TL;DR:

• SBC codec is OK
• Headphones have their own per-codec equalizer and post processing configuration
• aptX is not as good as the advertisements say
• LDAC is a marketing fluff
• Voice audio quality is still low
• Browsers are able to execute audio encoders compiled to WebAssembly from C using emscripten, and they won't even lag.

People are resorting to blockchain for all kinds of reasons these days. Ever since I started doing smart contract security audits in mid-2017, I’ve seen it all. A special category of cases is ‘blockchain use’ that seems logical and beneficial, but actually contains a problem that then spreads from one startup to another. I am going to give some examples of such problems and ineffective solutions so that you (developer/customer/investor) know what to do when somebody offers you to use blockchain this way.

Disclaimers

• The described use cases and problems occur at the initial stage. I am not saying these problems are impossible to solve. However, it is important to understand which solutions system creators offer for particular problems.
• Even though the term ‘blockchain use’ looks strange and I am not sure that blockchain can be used for anything other than money (Bitcoin), I am going to use it without quotes.

1. Supply chain management

Let’s say you ordered some goods, and a carrier guarantees to maintain certain transportation conditions, such as keeping your goods cold. A proposed solution is to install a sensor in a truck that will monitor fridge temperature and regularly transmit the data to the blockchain. This way, you can make sure that the promised conditions are met along the entire route.