Cisco reveals its Internet of Everything router

Cisco Tuesday unveiled its Internet of Everything router, a device intended to address the growth in Internet traffic brought about by cloud, mobile, video and machine-to-machine communications.

The Network Convergence System (NCS), which was expected, is the culmination of three years of work by 450 engineers and $250 million in funding, Cisco says.

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NCS includes a new network processor Cisco introduced two weeks ago: the nPower X1.

The system is not a core router like the Cisco CRS, or a successor to the CRS, the company says. Rather, it is a network fabric designed to scale CRS cores and ASR 9000 edge routers in service provider networks from centralized systems to distributed architectures able to accommodate the growth of Internet connected "things," like cars, homes and machines.

[BUT DIDN'T THEY JUST ANNOUNCE...New Cisco core router boasts 10X capacity of original]

Cisco expects trillions of these device-driven events to come online in the next decade, a situation the company refers to as the Internet of Everything.

Cisco says it plans to equip the CRS systems with the nPower chip as well to improve scale and introduce programmability into the platform for core routing requirements.

Cisco says the NCS can transport the entire NetFlix library in less than one second in a full multi-chassis deployment. It converges IP and optical networks in the service provider realm with Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) server and Dynamic Fabric Automation networking in the data center to serve as a "central nervous system" for a programmable infrastructure founded on the nPower chip and onePK APIs in Cisco operating systems.

This "central nervous system" is designed to shift and redirect data center, core, edge and optical resources in real-time to speed service rollouts and reduce operational cost and complexity, Cisco says. This is enhanced through virtualization capabilities in system software that elastically scale up and down network and compute resources, and manage multi-chassis configurations as a single system.  

If system scale is exceeded in one part of the network, NCS moves control plane functions onto UCS servers in the data center, Cisco says. NCS can also harness distributed Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and other Cisco virtualization mechanisms to enable cross domain function orchestration and service placement where required, the company says.

Analysts say the fabric and programmability of NCS will turn up the competitive heat with Juniper's PTX and Alcatel-Lucent's 7950 XRS routers.

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Leaked US spying budget reveals investments in 'groundbreaking' cryptanalysis

IDG News Service - The U.S. intelligence community is reportedly using 20% of its $52.6 billion annual budget to fund cryptography-related programs and operations.

Some of those funds are invested in finding weaknesses in cryptographic systems that would allow breaking encrypted communications collected from the Internet and elsewhere, according to a portion of a top-secret document published Thursday by The Washington Post and obtained from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

The document is the fiscal year 2013 budget proposal summary for the National Intelligence Program, which spans 16 agencies with over 107,000 employees. The entire report called "FY 2013 Congressional Budget Justification" has 178 pages, according to the Post, but the newspaper only published 17, including a 5-page statement signed by U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

In his statement, Clapper listed the primary areas of investment for the intelligence community which included Signals Intelligence (SIGINT). In respect to SIGINT he wrote: "We are bolstering our support for clandestine SIGINT capabilities to collect against high priority targets, including foreign leadership targets. Also, we are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic."

Cryptanalysis is the science of analyzing cryptographic systems in order to find weaknesses that would allow obtaining the contents of encrypted messages without advance knowledge of the encryption key.

Previous documents leaked by Snowden revealed that the NSA is collecting Internet communications en-masse with the help of telecommunication and technology companies. U.S. companies that operate the backbone telecommunications and Internet infrastructure are paid millions of dollars every year by the government to allow the NSA to collect data as it moves through their fiber-optic cables and networks, the Post reported Thursday.

The newly leaked budget reveals that this money is paid through a project called the "Corporate Partner Access" that was expected to cost $278 million during fiscal year 2013, the newspaper said. There are some other payments for "Foreign Partner Access" totalling $56.6 million, although it's not clear if these are for foreign companies, foreign governments or other entities.

The NSA's mass upstream interception of Internet traffic has prompted many people in the security community to wonder what the agency's crypto-cracking capabilities might be in relation to encryption schemes and protocols that are in widespread use on the Internet today. Some crypto experts believe that there is not reason to believe the NSA can crack strong encryption algorithms vetted by scientists, but others said that the feasibility of breaking widely used encryption protocols like SSL/TLS depends on various factors, like key size and other configurations.

While the leaked budget document does not provide details about the NSA's ability to crack encrypted communication, it does confirm that cryptography and cryptanalysis are one of the U.S. intelligence community's key areas of interest.

Twenty-one percent, or roughly $11 billion, of the 2013 budget was intended for the Consolidated Cryptologic Program (CCP), which includes NSA programs and is staffed by around 35,000 employees. This makes it the second most expensive program of the intelligence community after the Central Intelligence Agency program, which was supposed to receive 28% of the funds.

Of the $11 billion used to fund the CPP, around $2.5 billion, or 23%, were intended for "collection and operations" and $1.6 billion, or 15%, for "processing and exploitation." The program's biggest expenses were estimated in the "enterprise management and support" category which was set to receive 26% of the funds.

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2012 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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