Be The Packet. Take each hop it makes. Your network will repay you

Roundup Did you ever wish you had a half-a-gigabit-per-second connection you could fire up anytime, at zero cost? You can, it turns out – but only between paired Android phones.

Google last week announced an upgrade to its Files Go app, which it says is particularly popular for phone-to-phone transfers in places like India as it gets around using expensive mobile data to share pics.

The Chocolate Factory said Files Go's maximum speed is now up to 490 Mbps, a nice bump from its previous 125 Mbps performance.

At that speed, Google's claim that Files Go users are sharing 100 TB worth of content daily isn't incredible, even if it's yet another example of consumer-grade apps offering the potential for data exfiltration.

Users' data, Google promises, is protected with encryption, and the app helps verify that the sender is connecting to the right recipient; it takes five seconds to connect two phones; and the app works all the way back to Android Lollipop (5.0).

Be the packet

Once you've used Files Go to move files, pause a moment to ponder the packets' journey between Android devices.

We make that suggestion after seeing the Tweet below from security chap Jack Rhysider.

Best advice I got for doing network troubleshooting: Be the packet.

For every hop along the network, each device has to make a decision what to do with the packet. If you put yourself in the packet's perspective, you can figure a lot of stuff out.

— Jack Rhysider (@TunnelsUp) June 27, 2018

Do we have to drink a beer for each hop, Jack? That's latency we could learn to like!

Qualcomm working on upgradeable IoT

Qualcomm and Gizwits are cooperating to try and crack one of the Internet of Things' more difficult problems: securely field-upgrading low-function devices.

Qualcomm's announcement explained that the work will start by putting field-upgradeability on 2G IoT devices designed for deployment in China.

A module designed for the China Mobile network, Quectel's BG36 (based on Qualcomm's MDM9206 modem) will be integrated with Gizwits' IoT cloud, to provide over-the-air activation, and support later transition to LTE standards.

By the first half of 2019, Qualcomm says it will offer modem upgrades over its wireless edge services that launch at the end of 2018.

ETSI: how to 5G with edge computing

If you're following ETSI's role in 5G, here's a white paper for you explaining how the European standards body's Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) fits into 5G rollouts.

The document explains MEC's role in cloud service providers, serverless computing and cloud integration for IoT rollouts, for enterprise users, and for industrial IoT.

The publication's announcement notes that there's an MEC hackathon coming up in September, colocated with Knect365's annual event at the Edge Computing Congress.

HPE demos multivendor VNFs

HPE and Deutsche Telekom have conducted a proof-of-concept in which they ran up a multivendor virtual network function (VNF) demonstration.

The Network Data Layer (NDL) was based on HPE's Shared Data Environment, which follows the NGMN Alliance's standard specifications.

HPE's data sharing capability is designed to take the weight off the VNF, by storing data external to the VNF. Deutsche Telekom provided the PCRF (policy and changing rules function) in the demonstration.

The HPE announcement said the demonstration shows that “stateless clients, in combination with a Network Data Layer architecture, significantly reduce the complexity of the overall solution by allowing network topological transparency, improved resiliency, as well as a reduced cloud integration and configuration process.”

6WIND displaces Cisco in Spanish ISP

6WIND is celebrating sticking a thumb in Cisco's eye: a Spanish ISP has used its software to replace hardware from Switchzilla and Mikrotik.

The ISP in question, Minorisa, has virtualised its core router network using the 6WIND 40G Turbo Router running on “white box” servers.

The company says it needed high availability BGP, OSPF, LAG, VLAN, and filtering capabilities, and while these were supported by Cisco and Juniper, whose offerings were also assessed, the price was too high.

SDN-readiness – since the virtual routers included open APIs and third-party SDN integration – was also an important factor in the decision.

Huawei, China Mobile, SAIC show off 5G-connected vehicles

The intelligence community's least favourite vendor, Huawei, this week it showed off a 5G-based connected vehicles capability – a 5G and LTE “cellular vehicle-to-everything” technology.

Huawei's partners in the demo were China Mobile and SAIC – no, not Science Applications International Corp of the American military-industrial complex, SAIC Motor, the Middle Kingdom's largest motor vehicle builder.

The big pitch out of the demonstration was end-to-end latency of 20 milliseconds (so if you're travelling at 100 km/h and need a round trip to the cloud to hit the brakes, the vehicle will travel about 60 metres during the network latency).

The group also demonstrated a technology called “Short TTI” which Huawei said gets the latency down to 10 ms (30 metres at 100 km/h).

IETF Drafts a defence against CDN loop attacks

A couple of years ago, a group of researchers described [PDF] how to attack Content Distribution Networks using what they called “forwarding loops”.

The paper explained that a customer can attack a CDN by creating a forwarding loop causing a request to be “processed repeatedly or even indefinitely, resulting in undesired resource consumption and potential Denial-of-Service attacks.“ Their claim that all CDNs were vulnerable in one way or another was denied by Akamai at the time.

Akamai apparently took the issue seriously though: its Stephen Ludin has worked with Fastly's Mark Nottingham and Cloudflare's Nick Sullivan to propose a loop-blocking standard.

The trio explain the loops can happen “because routing is achieved through a combination of DNS and forwarding rules, and site configurations are sometimes complex and managed by several parties.”

They propose a header field be added to HTTP, the CDN-Loop request header, “to help a Content Delivery Network identify when an incoming request has already passed through that CDN's servers, to prevent loops.” ®