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If I recall correctly Google built its own network gear long time ago. Completely makes sense. Looking at Cisco product with regard to security & the recent NSA
by aibottle 9y ago
If I recall correctly Google built its own network gear long time ago. Completely makes sense. Looking at Cisco product with regard to security & the recent NSA leaks you really don't want your network gear from them.
- holydude 9y agoWhat makes you think they can do it better in terms of security? In my opinion it is a matter of costs and trying to solve a specific problem.
- dsr_ 9y agoThink of it in the same terms as any other service you're contemplating: do you want to pay other people for proprietary stuff, or do you want to pay your own people to develop skills around open stuff? cisco has an incentive to not look foolish, but they don't particularly care about any small or mid-size accounts. Your people have an incentive to care about your security and functionality. Weigh up the advantages and disadvantages and make your choice appropriately.
- aibottle 9y agoWell mostly because they don't rely on any legacy code base but they can write it all by themselves. Also Google has somewhat of an reputation for security other than Cisco.
- astrodust 9y agoGoogle can better control their designs and supply chain than Cisco. Cisco's priorities are more directly profits. Google's are often more security related, though they can profit from being more secure.
- SCHiM 9y agoThey can better control their supply chain maybe, but still not good enough if/when they're up against state sponsored espionage.
- bastawhiz 9y agoAnd you think Cisco devices are better equipped against state-sponsored espionage?
- astrodust 9y agoI think they're worse off since they're manufactured abroad to known specifications.
- mlangdon 9y agoThe big difference here is that states can simply buy access to, e.g., a Cisco Nexus and attack it from inside and out until they find a vulnerability in NX-OS, let's say, a malformed CLI-via-HTTP call. Whereas, what software does a Google switch even run? What's the architecture, the APIs? You basically need someone inside Google, or for one of these things to fall off a truck. Way more involved and expensive than the 10k you might spend on a Nexus to throw it your lab and set your hackers on it.
- stargrazer 9y agoActually, Google has published papers and have presented talks (many of which are available on Youtube) on the type of gear they have developed. I don't know what their latest versions are, but recently they were using OpenFlow style infrastructure to provided fine-grained control (security, balancing, analysis) over flows through out their network. OpenFlow style constructs also provide a micro-segmentation style control (ie distributed firewall) over ingress/egress of traffic at the individual container/vm port level.
- closeparen 9y agoAn organization whose job it is to infiltrate hostile governments and intelligence agencies should have no problem infiltrating Google.
- dualboot 9y agoGoogle is a publicly traded company. The primary focus is always enhancing shareholder value.
- astrodust 9y agoBetter get on the phone with Jeff Bezos because he missed that memo.
- pducks32 9y agoAh shareholder value. Value is the keyword. It's not shareholder money per se. If a companies stock jumps because people think you are bold for making your own secure network equipment then you have created value. Security and privacy can make value. Look at Apple. Public perception of Apple makes up a nice part of their stock and it's based around (just to name some smaller ones) privacy and security.
- vgt 9y agoGoogle rolling its own hardware is a key security pillar. This is a good read on the topic: https://cloud.google.com/security/whitepaper https://cloud.google.com/security/whitepaper (work at G)
- jgalt212 9y agoyes, sounds a lot like the roll your own crypto conundrum.
- brianwawok 9y agoAt Google scale you can roll your own crypto. Or routers. Or hardware. Or CPU. Maybe not smart to roll your own everything, but a few of them sure.
- astrodust 9y agoI doubt they'd roll their own, but I bet Google has the talent to make very good implementations of proven crypto.
- dsacco 9y agoGoogle has the talent to roll its own crypto, and in fact it often does.
- tptacek 9y agohttps://github.com/google/tink https://github.com/google/tink Note the authors.
- astrodust 9y agoThat's the sort of thing I'm talking about. Good implementations of known-good crypto. I don't doubt that Google's trying to come up with new, novel cryptographic methods as well, but those take a long time to develop, test, and get reviewed. RSA didn't show up over-night and SHA3 has taken some time to get ready for production.