Darkly Colored Felines of Fury

Darkly Colored Felines of Fury » uod http://blackcat.ca Personal site for Patrick Audley and Blackcat Systems. Mon, 31 Jan 2011 05:11:30 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 My First Paper http://blackcat.ca/work/paper01 http://blackcat.ca/work/paper01#comments Fri, 21 Nov 2003 16:20:23 +0000 Patrick Audley http://blackcat.ca/work/paper01 This paper has been years in the making, and though I was only involved towards the end it was still a lot of fun. The paper evaluates several different methods for performing multiple sequence alignments (MSA). MSAs are used in biology to determine how similar several genes or proteins are. This is useful, for instance, to determine how closely related genes are among different species. Alternatively, MSAs can be used to compare different genes or proteins within a single species to find similar functions. MSAs are useful in other scientific fields, such as linguistics, where you need to determine the similarity between a number of sequences of things (like sentences of words).

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]]> http://blackcat.ca/work/paper01/feed/ 0 Cisco Bugs and Network Fun http://blackcat.ca/work/bioinform003 http://blackcat.ca/work/bioinform003#comments Fri, 21 Mar 2003 15:39:13 +0000 Patrick Audley http://blackcat.ca/work/bioinform003 I discovered my very own Cisco IOS bug.. Hooray.. After weeks of have network address translation problems on our new Cat6509, Chris and I found a new bug in Cisco’s operating system... Ick. Needless to say this meant much pain until we worked around it by setting up a BSD box to handle the NAT Wink. In addition to the bug, we also discovered a flaw in how Cisco implements NAT. Essential NAT (or overloaded many-to-one translation) works by hiding several machines behind a router. All conversations go through the router who remembers who on the inside is talking to who on the outside. From the outside (in this instance, the rest of the Internet) it appears as if all the conversations are with the router and from the inside (our local network) it looks normal. It’s a good trick and normally provides a reasonable level of security because the outside world can’t connect directly to the machines behind NAT. In theory. In the IOS implementation it seems that the last machine to make a connection out gets all traffic to the router’s overloaded address that doesn’t match an active translation. Basically it boils down to a random chance that an attacker can hit any machine behind the NAT. Sure it’s harder to exploit than a non-NAT network; but then Cisco really should be dropping those packets like any sane implementation of NAT. We found this bug when we firewalled the NAT to protect against this flaw in IOS, we also turned on IP inspection (our in non-Cisco terms: stateful firewalling). This is what caused the fatal bug in IOS and left us with a router that rebooted every half hour. Ick. Apparently the rest of the Cisco users haven’t noticed that NAT is brain dead in IOS and haven’t tried to firewall it. Cisco is working on a fix but it will be a while; hence the BSD box.

]]> http://blackcat.ca/work/bioinform003/feed/ 0 Careers: Academia http://blackcat.ca/work/academia http://blackcat.ca/work/academia#comments Wed, 01 Jan 2003 20:55:40 +0000 Patrick Audley http://blackcat.ca/work/academia Working in Academia was more satisfying in many ways than working in [STARTUPS,startups]. Most of the people who work in research were smart, well informed, and enjoy their work (Elizabeth and I thought this was because the pay was half that of the private sector, so anyone who doesn't like it gets a job there elsewhere).

I really enjoyed working in the [BIOINFORM001,Bioinformatics Dept.] and had great coworkers. This was the first time in all my career when I could truly say that I enjoyed everyone I worked with. Seminars were particularly enjoyable and it was always easy to find people talking passionately about things they love.

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