Cloud and security

    If you have not been living under a rock recently, you would have read about the Capital One hack, its relationship to the use of cloud technology and how its motivating people to ask the wrong questions. You can brush up on the details of the hack/breach in this post.

Application, software & service would be used interchangeably in this post.

    These kind of events are becoming a daily affair, mainly due to a simple reason; ease in which, a software/service can be deployed onto the cloud and DevOps responsible for the same, don't seem to understand all the gears and knobs (that could be modified) that are set to defaults, to get the service up and running in a infinitesimal short time. Security is not a bold line that differentiates the black, from the white. It's a nebulous grey area and needs to be understood, from each application 's requirements and its intended goal. Allowing port 80 for all IPs to a web server is an intended goal to serve traffic for the outside world, but that is not the same configuration, if it's meant to serve traffic only to the internal employees of the company. But the template to deploy that web server is the same for both the cases. 

    In pre-historic times, it would have been the responsibility of the administrator to understand these requirements to enforce and program these rules. But with Cloud Native, the role of an administrator has been merged with a developer to handle the new set of primitives, set forth by the trending agility of the infrastructure. 

    The aim of a developer is to develop and deploy a service, to help his company meets its financial goal. There are check lists to be followed, before deploying a service, but does it encompass all the backdoors, that come along with implementing new ideas? Does every developer follow it? When the aim is to develop and deploy ASAP, its human tendency to take short cuts; templates & default values support these shortcuts with unintended consequences. A big chunk of the DevOps responsibility is about operations, to maintain the uptime of deployed solution.

    All it took was a simple misconfiguration of the service to flood an, otherwise iron fortress. Auditing tools like Qualys or container deployment platforms like CCP (Cisco Container Platform), helps you with tools to identify weakness in the deployed solution. But it still takes manual intervention to review the results, apart from flagging the obvious holes. Solutions like Istio provide a mechanism to automate the traffic security that flows between the containers of a Micro services architecture, but they can only do so much(based on configuration). 

    The missing link is to have a security review of the solution, as part of the deployment process. and not just rely on the supporting tools. Once you have a baseline and that constitutes the initial heavy lifting, the subsequent iterations would have to concentrate only on the delta. Security is not a destination, it's a goal that is alive, as along as the solution is deployed.

    

AI and the invented conundrum

Recently I read this article The Metamorphosis that talks about AI (Artificial Intelligence), its positive & negative impact on our society(which is already in motion), as well as the invented social conundrums that goes along with it.

AI has been in use for the past few decades in various forms. Either it's voice recognition on a phone to guide you through a pre-fabricated menu or auto correction on your preferred word processor. It started with automating mundane, repetitive tasks to free up the human intelligence to tasks that require additional attention or were difficult to automate. Human touch was required to tasks, that were either prone to errors on automation or the return on investment (ROI) was not sufficient enough to garner attention. It seemed that the AI's requirement of costly processing power was not able to compete with cheap Human brain power.

In the beginning of this decade, few pieces of the AI puzzle started to fall in its place and that propelled  its adoption.

• Cheap CPU cycles
• Cheap Storage
• Cheap Data 

With the advent of Social media, the explosive power of search and moving all our daily activities to a digital platform; they became the source of fire hose of data, that could be channeled and collected on flexible cloud infrastructure with cheap CPU and Storage. This formed the underlying basis of big data and the analysis of this data for patterns and anomalies led to breakthrough in solving various problems. This includes and not limited to targeted advertisements, credit card fraud, predicting stock sentiments and so forth.

Humans as a species have always tried to evolve forward, either through discovery or by invention. But as apart of that process, there has been collateral damage in the wake of progress. When the Spaniards landed at Central America, they decimated the local population with their diseases, but the world was introduced to this new continent along with its abundance of natural resources and culture.

With AI, progress would be made in various fields(insurance, medicine) and AI systems would be allowed to make decisions, that would affect human lives. The decision could be as simple as; approving an application for health insurance considering the various aspects of the applicant, age, or propensity of the applicant to fall sick often. Or a decision to prescribe a life saving drug(limited resource), considering the propensity of the applicant to be a drug abuser or a negative impact to society. 

Humans already have similar decisions on things like organ transplant, but we are at peace with this decision, since we know it was an informed decision by a respectable quorum of doctors. Would we be fine with this,  if that decision was left to an AI. What if, there was a bug in the algorithm that skewed the decision making process. AI algorithms and the data fed to these algorithms are generated by humans and humans by nature are biased. Be it along lines of race, religion or sexual orientation, but implicit bias is an issue that would have to be dealt with. We deal with this, by explaining the process used to achieve the result. Would an AI be able to rationalize its decision making process in human terms?

The ethical veracity of these AI decisions needs to be dissected before we let these systems rule all aspects of our lives.

In conclusion, AI systems will open up a plethora of opportunities from driverless cars to mining meteors for minerals. It also opens up a pandora's box, along the lines of social inequality and racial injustice. As humans, we have to pay attention to details and correct the system as required in an unbiased manner to continue to evolve as an intelligent species.

The story of my Laptop...

After I reached U.S, I realized that a Laptop was an absolute necessity. I found that I had a lot of free time and I liked to watch movies/series online to kill time. An Internet connection with unlimited download was the motivation I needed to buy myself a new laptop, with a minority of its time being spent for my studies (Grinning...).So Finally I got a new HP 14'' laptop with 12 cell battery and a 128MB Nvidia graphics card. It was an awesome piece of technology that I used daily to play games like Crysis I & II, CoD: MWI & MWII, AOE & CS to name a few. Man... I used to spend more time playing games and watching movies... than studying with that laptop. The minuscule amount that I spent for my studies were also productive [Big grin again...] . It has withstood my continues barrage of buggy code and never had it given up on me. The laptop trusted me. But after 2 years... four semesters down and I am trying to finish my Thesis...my laptop just shutdown's down one fine evening.

The screen flickers for a few seconds and then it goes blank. I am thinking either the OS crashed or my program crashed, so I do the most efficient way to restart a windows machine.Give is a hard reboot!!. And so it starts to boot up and then the screen freezes again. I am like keeping my fingers crossed to hard reboot again. This time even the BIOS does not execute. F***, I am screwed. All of my data regarding my Thesis is on this laptop. I am cursing my self for not taking the backup.

Like any self-respecting Computer Engineer, I try to fix it by myself by removing battery, HD and even the RAM and I stop myself there, cos I couldn't go further than that. Since the warranty had expired , I can't ship it to HP for fixing it. So I paid an expert to check on my laptop and the diagnosis: "MOTHERBOARD, kicked the bucket!!".

It looks like, it can take only so much abuse...As I am writing this, my laptop is in the corner of the room stripped of its stomach( Hard Drive) waiting to be scrapped.

I am so attached to that laptop that I am refusing to give it up, even for scraps now. It has been there with me through a lot of tough times...(:D).

And that is the short & tragic story of my Laptop.

My Saturday Night mix

It is Saturday evening and I am relaxing on the couch with my roomies laptop browsing online.You could hear the Eminem's "Without Me" in the background and as the beat starts to kick into my veins ,I smell something really hot!.It was my roomies trying to cooking Beef fry.Boy was the smell good.

This is our first time.Believe it or not,we found the number of whistles required to cook beef in the cooker online.Isn't is really cool that NET comes to everyone's aid...I hope that we can try to eat the Beef after finishing the cooking else it would be real waste of $5 down the drain... :(

Will let you know regarding the results in my next post.

-Alphy

Physic at work

So...
After fours years of gap ,I am taking up my Master's .Would this be a uphill task or a cake walk? I assume only the outcome can decide on that.Hmmm... One thing is for sure! After watching guys fresh out of college here,I can view that my way of doing things is bit different and slower ( surely I don't say mine is more mature!! so no laughs).Have to gear up and put on my thinking hat.It is really needed cos I am plannin on completing my Master's with thesis.So all high funda stuff but will I have the heart for it first? then the brain part comes in.( which I have assumed so far that I have!! :))ok,Moving on...

The university seems to be a really good place to learn and conducive to think,but I seem to be going towards the other direction.Just Kidding not yet started any!!

Well enough rambling for one day .Paid for my medical insurance this semester and it cost me $582( That is a huge sum ).It also seems that I have missed out on some of the shots required for Immunization ,so have to take on two more shots and that is gonna cost me another $100 ( It ain't covered in my Insurance :-( ).I think that I have never spent such a huge amount in one day in 10 minutes without giving much thought to that.No other option.

Well that kinda completes my day today.Forgot to add that today is my second day @ the Kitchen.Cooked some ladies finger fry.It had all the required elements to make it edible,but was not something that everyone would crave for.Well I think that would come with practice :).Don't laugh yourself to death,I was not the only one who ate it.

My mom had said that I would be a better cook than her,by the time I finish my Master's. :)) LOL. Pretty neat huh.Well I think I should start reading my textbooks for the courses from now onwards.

Well catch your guys later.

-Alphy

Family & Relatives...

Have you ever wondered about the type of people,that you would/could meet in your life?About the type of life you might want to lead? About the type of lifestyle that you might be comfortable with?About your partner for the rest of your life?About the people who could/would influence your life?

I started thinking about all these stuff and anything and everything that comes to my mind( that seems like a memorable event) involves atleast one of my family member,my dad,mom,siblings,cousins and few friends,which whom I have seen the worst/best so far in life.

It seems that world is not an important place without family and some show this feeling externally.Guys like me for whom expression of any emotion seems like a quaint procedure try not to take much of it in.

It does not matter,how much you have gained from your life,but how much you have shared,to make others life livable.Well I am not a great person to share anything,but I try to ensure that I am not the cause of problem for others....

Well that should be a start? :)

Enough of my Rambling for today.
Try to hav a Nice Day.

-Alphy