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InvisibleNet Presents IIP
An anonymous submitter writes: "A new and ever growing project has launched into the alternative
network realm, changing the pace by focusing directly on speech, rather than file sharing. The Invisible Irc Project, a peer
distributed secure and anonymous internet relay chat network has popped up
at some of the recent conventions this past year. The creator, and project leader, known as 0x90, has been seen at
CodeCon 2002 introducing
it to the public, at that time in more of a primitive state, and
today, almost a year later, the software has noticeably been more
usable by the masses. 0x90 just gave a talk at ToorCon 2K2 on designing a robust
& secure Peer-2-Peer framework, and their InvisibleNet site just released
new software
along with a two part interview that
was taken in July. A good read that details the depths of their
project, including the state it is in now, and the future vision of
a privately distributed steganographical crypto-net. I have tried
out the software and it is very easy to set up, and it supports the
freenixes, OS X, and Win32 machines. You can use any irc client
with it seemlessly, and the cryptography is handled transparently
within your "IIP" node. It's GPL so peer review is welcome, as it
also states this on their site. It appears to have a nice community
of users with a range of discussions. So if you have a bit of time
on your hands to engage in some chatting online, give this a try.
It's alternative, creative, and possibly a standard setting step to
securing IRC as we know it."
I tried it, and it worked very well right out of the box. I am really looking forward to seeing them develop the InvisibleNet platform further - it might even become a serious competitor to what FreeNet is now.
I noticed you posted Anonymous Coward. Is it so we don't see the l33t speak in your handle :)
Now instead of nuking an entire irc server to take down a channel all I gotta do is smurf a node, while being able to download mp3s, and get spam messages to view explict websites. What a great idea :)
I gotta love slashdot, just before I decided to cave in and do homework, theres a post on slashdot involving downloading, irc AND encryption!
... still won't help if you tell people who you are.
Your nick + the personal information you give out, even inadvertently, is more than enough to let people figure out who you are. You can build rather complete profiles of most people, even the security concious, from nothing but public information. I should know...
I am 06x0 and I challenge you to a duel, 0x90! You see, we are like brothers. If you stand on your head while reading my name, you see your name! However, only one of us can exist. So you must die! There can be only one!
--- 06x0
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
... that way I'll be "too gross."
This sig is false.
Social Contract? I don't remember signing any Social Contract!
Why wouldn't someone put up proper firewall protection BEFORE they go into IRC channels that broadcast IPs. Better yet, get one of the (many) programs that spoof your IP for you.
Geez.
Keep in mind that DCC and CTCP are disabled due to anonymity reasons, you can't use the current IIP network for filetransfer.
But ofcourse you can paste freenet keys and urls.
Terrorists! All those IRC Crypto people are terrorists!
All real, patriotic citizens are more than happy to let the government see, read and catalog everything they do.
All those "Privacy" nuts have something to hide.
I'll bet this 0x90 is learning to fly a plane while building bombs, writing free encryption programs, laundering money for the mob, selling drugs to toddlers, writing a violent video game, and *gasp* TRADING MP3S while on IRC with his fellow communist baby eaters!
</humor>
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
0x90 is the instruction code for 'NOP' (No OPeration) on IA32.
In case anyone wondered. (I'm guessing... not)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
It's also gross in decimal, as in, a gross (144).
This sig is false.
Social Contract? I don't remember signing any Social Contract!
On a related note, on IIP you can /mode #channel +a to make even the nicknames anonymous. Yours still shows up in your own client though, but others will see you as "Anonymous". Pretty useful, but otherwise theres not much activity on IIP. The technology is there, wheres the application?
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
IRC is insecure?
there are several extant irc encryption tools that work over normal irc servers.
one nice open source one (only runs on win32 with mIrc irc client):
http:\\mircryption.sourceforge.net
It's great! When the boss comes around the corner, you don't have to minimize the window! Screenshots of Invisible IRC are in the link below.
mund freud.
I find it a bit slower on the outset then regular IRC, but completely painless to run. Only a little more time to tell if it crashes because of the ./ effect.
They also have a chanserve, nickserve named "Trent" if you are wondering, I havent tried to create a channel yet, but we shall see how it works.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
i just tried this, its very cool.
:(
although a bit laggy, and can get confusing on +a channels, where everyone is anonymous, heres an example
sup?
ello
this is working?
no
you broke it!
no ok
wtf
who are you?
im anonymous
nobody loves me
I love you
and with everyones host being anon.iip it must be hard to ban people, but its a very intresting idea
We have a nickserv/chanserv clone called Trent
/squery trent help /squery trent nickreg password /squery trent identify password
For help:
To register your nick:
To identify:
See also the IIP manual
/me prepares for flamebait ratings.
Is this really such a good idea, keeping in mind the terrorist attacks last year? Bare with me, I do have a point.
I'm one for privacy and also for secure ways of doing things on the internet, BUT, and its a BIG BUT, think of the other uses this could have, especially for terrorists. This sort of thing could give more fuel to the fire for governments to try to crack down on the internet and create more of a big brother state where they are able to monitor everything and encryprion is outlawed.
On the other hand, think about the earlier post today from Chris Tresco, where he says that encryption is only as strong as your weakest link. What if one of the machines along the way was compromised? Could it be used to monitor data and then be analysed to connect the dots so to speak?
None-the-less, I think it's an interesting project and wish them the best of luck.
Yes, he enjoys slathering my naked body in hot, pepper jack cheese sauce.
A circle-snot is a Taco-snotting circle-jerk, another practice common among the Slashdot crew.
Dave: /whois CuteChqk
Trent: I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that.
Resistance to Deliberate Attacks is often strongly related to scalability. Sure, there are other ways to attack systems - find bugs in the code, or do social engineering attacks like posting Scientology documents and Metallica songs and ratting out any identifiable network operators. But attacks on the network's scalability can be really hard to fix, because they abuse things the system _is_ supposed to do rather than things it isn't. Have you looked at what parts of the network are easy to overload with data volume or small-message quantity or CPU-burning public-key crypto calculations or other critical resources?
.
.
Oh, also, Invisibility is Cool, huh huh, huh huh, Invisible, yeah cool.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Slashdot hasn't had real nerds in it in a while. It's so many kids on daddies computer. And I thought it was pretty funny. Seeing as Chris Tresco got busted for trading warez on irc maybe an invisible irc would be A Good Thing® But no I suppose thats actually off topic. Actually I'm thinking those dildo bosses are readin slashdot. And when he said dildo boss he means that when u take the hair off most bosses they have a pointy head, like a dildo. (Ask your girlfriend if you don't what that looks like)
There are some chat networks which obfuscate IP addresses on command like Slashnet and Sorcery.Net but this is a better solution. After having suffered an attack while in channel on a notorious "open" IRC network, one which displays naked IP addresses, IRC has suddenly gotten less fun. This might put the fun back into it.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Doesn't Trillian do secure chat?
Through the AOLIM protocol... I take it this is much more secure though?
0x90 is the x86 assembler code for "No Operation"
M: Agent 007, you've got stop 0x90!
007: Er, what's his name, Q?
M: 0x90, the man is involved in all kinds of cracker activity
007: Um yes, just working on the pronunciation...
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
I think the primary focus of IRC development at the moment should be on inventing methods to stop the packet kiddies, otherwise IRC's lifetime looks pretty bleak. Maybe distributed IRCing is the way to go?
From the docs that I helped write: :)
Chapter 10 of IIP Documenetation from CVS
This is also why peer review is requested. I think most of your doubts will be put to rest by the docs though. Go read it!
Yeah, that name is pretty gross.
p.s., If you don't get the joke, don't moderate this post.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
/. really needs a punny rating. I'm just not sure if it should be +1 or -5.
nop I don't get it.
</pun>
so what happened? /. people go? ;)
<ArdVark> where did all the
*** crappy has joined #anonymous
<echelon> <nop> not really I turned off the server
<echelon> <nop> there is still semi centralization
*** hobbs has joined #anonymous
<echelon> netsplit
*** iip has joined #anonymous
*** anonymoose has joined #anonymous
<ArdVark> netsplit? no
*** echelon sets mode: -o Aprogas
*** echelon sets mode: -o Chocolate
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
yes, and this extract from the interview seems to confirm
that yours is the 'correct' decoding of the nick -
still like the 'gross' interpretation but...
oh and
Bravo
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Its also the 6502 assembly opcode for Relative Branch if Clear Carry. And keep in mind, the x86 NOP instruction is actually aliased to XCHG EAX, EAX.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
explain the joke.. Enlighten us ohh master of the great humours... p.s. why didn't it show up as the world's funniest joke? in the news. if you look. I didnt think it was that funnny.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Someone please explain the name already, I'm sure there's some karma in it for you.
His "joke" was that 0x90 is 144 in dec. 144 is gross.
And yes, it was a idiotic joke. I "got it" immediately. Still wasn't funny.
Reading the docs briefly tells that this works by connecting through "proxies" before the actual servers. The proxies will provide the anonymity because they don't know what the transferred data is and servers don't know what the client's IP is, only the proxy's.
I guess this is fine as long as anonymity is all you want, but I don't see this getting mass attention. It's just yet another IRC network. Don't know about you but I'm sick of having different IRC networks, it'd be so much easier to just connect to "IRC" and be able to talk to everyone. Allowing everyone to run servers which all could talk to each others would effectively do this, just like SMTP protocol with emails. There's a few projects that have been meaning to do this, but none of them is anywhere close to a working implementation AFAIK.
Some links: irc+, irc++. Also jabber does pretty much the same, but it seems much more about instant messaging than containing all IRC's functionality.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isnt displaying an ad for shopIP on their SourceForge hosted site in violation of the SourceForge user agreement?
I don't advertise for anything on my own sf project page just because I read that you're not supposed to profit from your SF web space....
I've worked in VPN and P2P space for past few years and have been poking around the similar ideas for quite some time.
The basic idea is very simple - you create trusted network of anonymous -proxies- and if node sees the traffic coming from the peer it's just unable to tell if it belongs the peer or some proxied node behind it. Hense the anonymity is built into the infrastructure.
While looking at this, I got as far as putting together formal design document and protocol spec, and passed them around for the "peer review". The common problem everyone pointed out was the fact that this approach will not scale. It might be fine for IRC traffic, but it cannot and should not be applied to bulk data transfers. This is something InvisibleNet still has to realize.
It's good that they have a momentum, which may (or may not) allow them to overcome principal problems of the architecure.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
IIP 'security protocol' seems to be pretty amamteurish piece of design. I might be excessively picky, but here are some points anyway:
... So why to reinvent the wheel ?
* Excessive use of pubkey cryptography (two DH exchanges ? How about regular Master/Derived key approach ?)
* Home-brewed replay protection (see SSL/ESP for design ideas). In particular, having no explicit sequence ID in the packet may potentially allow for the replay or packet reuse.
* No packet hashing to allow discarding malformed packets without decryption (see SSL/ESP for design ideas).
* Unproven key rotation algorithm, which seems more of 'obscurity through security' thing than anything else.
* No sign of declared on the main page Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) in the published specs.
* Complete intolerance to minimal payload twitches (bitflips), ie heavy inter-packet dependency.
The bottom line is the protocol is very rare and can use a lot of much needed peer review.
The fine print is WHAT IS WRONG WITH SSL ?! SSL already has all the goodies (replay, rekey, authentication, etc) and it's stable and proven. It's not like IIP-CS allows to work over unreliable media or something, it's still layered over sessioned, reliable transport (TCP)
3.243F6A8885A308D313
Oh, that's right.
FOAD
d f
klasjdf;ksajdf;lsdafjasdhfkjlasdfjkasdfasdfjkas
I really wish you hadn't posted that anonymously. I'd really like to add myself to your fans list.
One example of why this system does not offer the level of anonymity/security it is claiming is the mistaken belief that adding random "cover traffic" prevents traffic analysis. For some reason amateurs seem to think that if you add a few random bits of message traffic and delay a few messages between nodes then this "noise" will make observation and message correlation harder for an attacker. This is incorrect. The simple example that should help the
There are several lists out there populated by people who actually know what they are doing when it comes to this stuff and simply lack the time/initiative to code up what they know. If the creators of IIP had simply asked a few pertinent questions they would have learned a lot and saved themselves a lot of frustration given that most of this will have to be completely re-coded if it is actually going to live up to the claims being made by this project.
Linux RPMs of the tool can be found at http://www.stearns.org/iip/. Also, there's a public server at wstearns.stearns.org:6667
Mason, Buildkernel and more: http://www.stearns.org/
We have an option implemented called the steady protocol, this is a constant bandwidth mode, and is easily done by replacing the spurt in your node.ref to steady when acting as a relay. We are very familiar with this method, and are working similarly to a DC-Net in the future. Also, the study of onion-routing, and other methods are in consideration. This is a bold project admittedly, and any help is furthur welcome.
Thanx.
0x90
Also, given world wide distribution of nodes, the high improbability of being able to gather and analyze that data (encrypted as such) as well, is rare, so as the network gets bigger, there is a lot of data to analyze, and this is highly unlikely to be able to trivially track.
0x90
And if you get it, mod it as -3 not funny.
For starters a DC-net is not what you want here because of the communications overhead it creates (the latency would kill you unless you made your DC-net rings rather small, which would introduce other problems...) Additionally, while a DC-net seems trivial because Chaum did such a good job at describing the basics of how it works, in practice it is very, very difficult to create a DC-net which resists internal attacks. DC-nets have the wonderful property of ensuring sender and recipient anonymity but this same property makes it hard to prevent jamming attacks and node collusion. The protocols which were built on top of DC-nets to prevent these problems turn a system which seems trivial to code in the simple example Chaum gives into something that is a PITA to actually get done right. If you really want to do a DC-net I would suggest you dig up a ref to an old cypherpunks posting I sent out way back when regarding applying reputation metrics as a mechanism for controlling these attacks within DC-nets.
The onion routing work suffers from the same problem IIP does, it does not enforce constant bandwidth connections so it is not difficult to discover routes based upon statistical analysis. If you want a model to examine, I suggest you check out Wei Dai's pipenet for a general model and be sure to look at the work Roger Dingledine and others have been doing with MIX-cascades.
This is inferior to the great SILC protocol. But whichever you choose, it really doesn't matter. You think creating a "channel" on invisible irc will protect your defacer crew's conversations from the feds? Not if they go on invisible irc and join your fucking channel . There are many different ways that this so called security can be bypassed, and most of them involve a person being a dumbass -- and as this article from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology states, a dumbass, most often, is unwilling to admit or recognize that he is indeed a dumbass.
It does not matter that the traffic is encrypted in this case. An attacker is not necessarily interested in getting the contents of the messages, they will start off wanting to know who is talking to who. For this it is not necessary to break the encryption, you treat the whole network as a black box and apply some signal processing tricks to get the conversation flows. [Sorry if all of this sounds negative, but you have decided to tackle a very hard problem that lots of very smart people have been thinking and tinkering on for more than a decade...]
A lot of hyping going on here, no doubt of that but the sad fact is that IIP is totally broken by design. And this is clear by just reading the two page, so called, "crypto" protocol. They have made all the classical mistakes with Diffie-Hellman and in general protocol design (ever heard of NOT using Diffie-Hellman without digital signatures!?). It is clear that they don't have any kind of background in cryptography or security. As mission critical application IIP cannot be recommended. For securing your chats from your parents, I guess it's fine for that. Take a look at SILC instead.
Ok, mister I didn't actually read the code and assumed way to much. Try and man in the middle it. Umm, first priority was implementing DH sufficiently against those common attacks.
THanks but no thanks.
Think deeper, maybe instead of knowing one half-cocked diffie-hellman attack, signatures aren't the only way to identify in this world of cryptography we live in. Can you figure it out. Doubt it, it would require some creative thought. Well, either way, man in the middle your way out of that box, see if that will help.
Peace.
Your thoughts on Quantized Blocks of Messages, where they are timed message inputs and are displayed all at once on a channel? Would this be a good method to avoid time delay attacks. Also can you give me your email address. just get our email at the iip site.
THnx.
0x90
Little fluffy clouds,
Little fluffy clouds,
Li li little little li li little fluffy clouds
0x90 Solve for x.. it must be a 6.
0690 makes sense as a nick. (and when the other guy replied "my nickname is 06x0, it confirmed that I'm not the only pervert on the internet - not that there was ever any doubt!
06x0
0x90
----
0690
Yes, there are a few sets of key nodes on the internet, and they're pushing OC48 and up traffic. As long as you can log a steady stream of multigigabit/s traffic, that isn't a problem.
Why is there a need to ban people? I understand why there should be a function where people can ignore certain users, but I see banning used mostly to stifle those who disagree with ops. It is completely unnecessary and stifles the free flow of discussion.
To further explain "gross" is a quantity like "dozen". Dozen = 12, Gross = 144.
>>> you create trusted network of anonymous
>>How cany you both trusted and anonymous
>You trust those who you are proxying for.
Just to explain a bit more - every node would serve as a client and a proxy server.
As a client it would have at least one proxy node that it would use to communicate with the network on other side of the proxy. Client obviously cannot have an anonymity with the proxy, hense it must have a trust with proxy.
Consider the example - I have a number of friends (F) I trust. These friends have their own friends (FF) that I am neither trust nor is aware of . So F nodes will be serving as proxies for all communications happening between me and FF nodes. I will not know FF's identities, they will not know mine, but this all will work only if -I trust F- and -FF trust F-. See ?
3.243F6A8885A308D313
How the heck are you going to watch the big routers? Don't you need access to them?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It's great that Slashdot has been reduced to stealing their copy from Kuro5hin, word for word.
An attacker does not need to log multigigabit traffic, because IIP will not be generating this sort of traffic levels. The attacker only needs to filter out the packets which are obviously IIP packets (based upon packet construction, source or destination, etc.) and note the source IP, destination IP, packet size, and packet timestamps. I know people who build devices specifically for this purpose to do policy-based network security analysis and can watch mutliple gigabit ethernet feeds using a single 1Ghz+ P4 system while still being able to keep basic state on various connections to determine if people are tunneling non-approved protocols through port 80, etc.
It is really not that hard to do, and with the recent CALEA provisions here in the US and other anti-terrorism efforts by other countries such monitoring capability has almost become a requirements for the equipment used at these major exchange points... Sad, but true.
There are 2 schemes that I've seen for chat crypto. One involves using diffie hellman to negotiate keys between strangers automatically. this is convenient because key negotiation is automatic, and all a user has to do is click a checkbox to get it to work. trillian does this to negotiate blowfish keys. Problem is that it can be MITM'd. The other method I've seen is to use GPG or another openPGP implementation. This can be more secure, as a user can use more secure means of key exchange (burn onto cdrom and hand to your friend) but can be a real pain for people to set up and has all the other quirks of gpg. Fire uses that one.
What IIP does is meld these two schemes in a chocolate-peanut butter kind of arrangement. Inter network node communication uses the first method, but then it layers on the end to end properties of the second (albeit with a second DH exchange).
It also mitigates the client issue. Right now, mac and windows users can't exchange secure IM's because trillian uses one scheme and fire uses the other. IIP bridges this gap for everybody by simply proxying IRC.
So yes, IIP is a hack and you may regard it with a bit of scrutiny. However, you should step back and see how this protocol is similar/different than others in the context of its goals. I think they've done a good job using peer reviewed cryptosystem components when they were available to fit requirements and incorporated some of the better aspects of cryptographic solutions that are around to solve similar problems.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
I'm a real nerd. I can't get a date to save my life, so I spend all my time on the Internet. Doesn't that qualify?
It's known that one major US ISP is required by the government to track everything going over their networks.
It is widely believed that this ISP is Verio, and that the logging was a requirement for regulator approval of its takeover by a Japanese telecom corporation whose name escapes me at this time.
It isn't all that implausible that federal regulation could be introduced such that this would be a requirement for all network backbones that carry traffic greater than X.
It's not a faggy nickname, it's simply the opcode for the NOP (no-op) instruction on Intel x86 CPUs.
"I love deadlines - I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by..." -Douglas Adams
There are three possibilities: Pioneer's solar panel has turned away from
the sun; there's a large meteor blocking transmission; someone loaded Star
Trek 3.2 into our video processor.
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Do you have some pointers to information about the devices you describe, or are they all in house/proprietary? I'm aware of Cisco's efforts in this area (sniffing layer 4 and above to detect port hopping), but it seems that if a protocol were truly obscure, it would have no discernable structure. Of course, if packets contained statistically random data, I guess that'd be a red flag, too.
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. . . is a reply to the last post now the last post, or does the previously last poster still claim last post?
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would be even better. A secret, underground network of 9600 baud modems exchanging messages and files via uucp and FidoNet. With military grade encryption, of course.
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