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Study Confirms ISPs Meddle With Web Traffic
Last July, a research team from the University of Washington released an online tool to analyze whether web pages were being altered during the transit from web server to user. On Wednesday, the team released a paper at the Usenix conference analyzing the data collected from the tool. The found, unsurprisingly, that ISPs were indeed injecting ads into web pages viewed by a small number of users. The paper is available at the Usenix site. From PCWorld:
"To get their data, the team wrote software that would test whether or not someone visiting a test page on the University of Washington's Web site was viewing HTML that had been altered in transit. In 16 instances ads were injected into the Web page by the visitor's Internet Service provider. The service providers named by the researchers are generally small ISPs such as RedMoon, Mesa Networks and MetroFi, but the paper also named one of the largest ISPs in the U.S., XO Communications, as an ad injector."
I am wondering whether altering web pages by inserting ads changes the ISP status of common carrier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier) thereby exposing it to liability for crimes and/or infringement perpetrated by its customers. Any takers?
Someone actually had the balls to NAME these ISPs, instead of referring to generic "providers". Of course it sucks to be you if you live in an area where they have exclusive coverage - but it's good to know who thinks they have the right to tamper with packets going between you and the destination of your choice.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
a: XO's spokesperson has publically stated (see the PCWorld article) that it was probably a reseller, not XO itself.
b: Most modifications, at least from the client viewpoint (and excluding the exploitable vulnerabilities which were discovered) are benign. 70% of the modifications were client-side proxies, such as personal firewalls, popup blockers, and add-removers.
Of the remaining, most other modifications where things like enterprise firewall services (which modify/insert Javascript checking code) and compression transformations (removing whitespace and/or routines for displaying downgraded images to save bandwidth).
Test your net with Netalyzr
Because of this issue and some related problems I've often wondered about extensions to HTTP to support cryptographically signed pages.
HTTPS is great, but involves a significant CPU cost per page and isn't friendly to web caches.
Signed pages, if static, could be signed once and stored. They'd also be cacheable with all the normal rules.
The main issue is key management. How do you get the signing key? Well, I'm pretty sure the HTTPS certificate key could be used to sign a page, though there might be risks to the integrity of the key. A better way would be to use a single HTTPS request to grab a signing key from the remote site.
Signatures could be just another HTTP header, so browsers without support would never even notice. An alternative would be a HTML comment after the close body tag. The HTTP header, though, would work for related resources like images as well, and for that reason would probably be much better.
Unfortunately, it's all useless because an ISP could trivially strip signatures from HTTP headers or pages if they wanted to mess with the page.
If this sort of thing keeps on happening sites will just have to start offering HTTPS for all communication. The dodgy ISPs will have lower cache hit rates and higher demand for external bandwidth, but they will have done it to themselves.
If only browsers would FINALLY include support for HTTP+TLS and for TLS upgrades, encryption could even be done transparently to the user.
All I see is "Local ISPs cure cancer. All hail SBC!"
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I was thinking of the same thing. Trying to wrap my mind around it.
The best analogy I can come up with is a kid delivering newspapers. You THINK the kid is just delivering the newspaper to you, but he is instead cutting out the advertisements (or god knows what else) and inserting his own client's advertisements while being paid for it.
Now of course, unlike a newspaper, a website does not get paid for the advertisements up front. So I cannot see this as anything other then stealing. We can argue the technicalities to death here, but the EFFECT is that the website was denied revenue from their ads, while the ISP gained ad revenue for themselves. Your question of compensation is interesting, but how could one gauge what that potential compensation could have been? Assume the individual would have clicked all the replaced ads on the page and then multiply for punitive damages?
I don't know about copyright violation as a complaint from the newspaper being a viable method to protect themselves. Is there legal protection afforded to websites that states the entire website must not be altered in any form during transit? Like I said I dunno.
What I find more foreboding is that you can no longer trust the "messenger". These ISP's absolutely MUST lose their common carrier status, since I believe that any ISP must remain impartial to the data being transmitted across its networks to have that status. Injecting advertisements into web sessions could not possibly be considered impartial. They have a direct financial motive to do so.
In order to protect their advertisement revenue streams websites may have to resort to strong measures, like encapsulating ALL of their traffic with HTTPS. That is just ridiculous.
I am sure that the proponents of Net Neutrality are going to enjoy their nice new shiny bullet.
tell us something we don't know http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/07/1457218 http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/29/2217231 http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/27/149253 http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/25/035200
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
When will this zombie...er, urban legend die (at least in the US?)
... and that was a ruling by the US Supreme Court.
... so DSLs don't escape either.
Cable Internet Service Not Common Carrier
Corollary:
FCC Reclassifies DSL, Drops Common Carrier Rules
I'm not rooting for this, but we need to try harder for an actual solution rather than seek the unicorn of a "solution" that didn't/no longer exists.
My sites charges for advertising -- it is NOT free. If an ISP inserts ads into my pages, then I expect to be properly compensated for them.
If an ISP starts inserting ads of my competitors on any of my web sites, that would be totally unacceptable behavior.
Does this occur when a client's ISP passes traffic from my host to the customer's client? If so, I don't know how I could monitor that or even detect it unless the client user notified me.
I'd like to hear more on this subject.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
All the huge communications/entertainment corporations and every government in the world have been trying for years to get control of the internet and make money off it/control it. It looks like the big push is on. The ISP's want to start throttling bandwidth and content, then raking in the cash from both ends. Governments have finally figured out that they can get what they want by bribery instead of just the threat of legislation, and so has the entertainment industry. They're all on the same page now, and all of us are squarely in their gun-sights.
It's time for those of us who value what we have here to wake up and start fighting back. The pressure is bound to get intense, and it's going to come from a lot of places. There's too much money to be made and too much power to be had in controlling the flow of information to a huge portion of the world's population.
I don't know whether the solution is technological, legal, some combination, or something completely different (like massive displays of civil disobedience, for example). But I'm utterly confident that if people don't start fighting back, we can all kiss access to unfiltered information goodbye.
And that will be a very, very dangerous thing.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Commies as in Comcast?
How many fulltime jobs can one man have?
We often complain about the efforts made by China and others in blocking Internet content. But how does this compare to modifying the content? With blocking you know it is blocked, but with modified content, can you tell? The ISP might say that it just puts ads on the pages, but would you trust it? Having a secret ISP framework for modifying content is a disaster waiting to happen. Personally, I think the web should go https.
I demand the Cone of Silence!
I use Rogers and am in Ottawa. Besides Bell, Rogers is it! Though I don't experience this ad injection bs (I don't use their browser) I must say they are hands down the fastest and most reliable ISP in this metro. Though pricey, one can now get 20D/1U speeds for their premium package at 100/month and I'm getting 12D/1U for their mid level. Standard is 10 for that price.
I suppose they aren't really high speed for the likes of Sweden or Japan, but in Canada, outside of business OC lines, I don't know of anyone faster.
The reason they're so against it is because they're already VIOLATING it! If net neutrality laws/policies came to be the ISPs would have to change the way they conduct business now.
Apparently they can inject ads without you using their browser. There are other ISPs in Ottawa btw, some just resell Bell's DSL though...which is now being throttled.
The toolkit requires you to run CGI scripts on your server to collect results, but we also have a web tripwire service that is easier to use (available on the same page above). Just add one line of JavaScript to your page, and our server will handle the integrity check and collect the results. We can then provide you with reports of the changes, much like Google Analytics.
We hope that by spreading web tripwires to other pages, we can at least deter ISPs from making further changes to web pages in-flight.
Gah. Two wrongs don't make a right.
And using the law as just some excuse to jail someone you don't like, even via some convoluted fallacy, is not how the rule of the law was supposed to work. And not just from a moral right vs wrong point of view, but it also takes away quite a bit out of the deterrence factor of the law and police. After all, if you know that (A) whether you get convicted or not depends more on whims, friends, or being in the wrong time at the wrong place, and (B) whatever you did, chances are decent they'll find a scapegoat to make an example of, instead of finding you, just says you have more chances to get away with something genuinely criminal.
We tried using spectacular shows of making an example of some bystander, to scare the criminals. Heck, half of the medieval justice worked like that, and the communist block kept at it until the bitter end. It doesn't really work well.
And in this case it would also create the precedent that _any_ content you serve can get you in PMITA state prison. There's nothing to say that only ISP's inserted ads can be demonized and victimized in your setup. Any site, regardless of whether it's serving ads, or is a free forum like Slashdot, or sells stuff on the internet, or is some company's web presence on the net, etc, could be hacked to serve malware, adware, spam, phishing, redirects to other sites, etc. Some of which, yes, porn or to porn.
So what do you propose? That if your company's site can be hacked like that, the CEO goes to jail? Well then how about we take that to the logical end then and give some responsibility in it to the guys who programmed those vulnerabilities too? Or to the admins who didn't secure the servers right? To the security teams who didn't find some glaring vulnerabilities? To the PHB's and developers who had an "auugh, those security guys are just bullies, blowing stuff out of proportion to make me look bad!" attitude and pulled all sorts of strings to get the severity rating lowered? To the beancounters who got a bonus for slashing the budget for security? To the controlling guy who insisted on hiring only the cheapest burger-flippers who had a crash-course in Java, as a cost saving measure? To the level 1 support monkeys who advised someone to disable his firewall and/or disable his virus scanner, just to install a stupid game or access some vuln-laden site? To the idiot who wrote that canned list of answers? Etc.
I mean, if it counts as "endangering the children" if you have some vulnerability that _could_ be used against children, then, seriously, there are a _lot_ of people who had a hand in creating that vulnerability, not just the CEO. That's a lot of jails we'll need.
You'll also notice that it just doesn't say "stop tampering with the sites". It just says that if you can be hacked, you can go to jail. So if you're sure enough of your code and your admins to be on the internet at all, then you're sure enough to mangle the web pages too. E.g., if you're sure enough that your ad server is secure enough to use it on your web site, then you're sure enough to use it in other people's pages too. After all, if it were hacked to serve kiddie porn, it would serve it on your own site too.
No. If it has to be stopped, it has to be a clear law and applied uniformly. The idea isn't even new. Any country has laws against tampering with snail mail. Make it illegal to mess with someone's electronics communications, and apply it impartially and uniformly.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Great study, kudos etc, but one small heads up:
On visiting vancouver.cs.washington.edu (which you are encouraging people to digg and blog) I'm told that I have taken part in an experiment, many thanks, fait accompli - I'm not told (or at least, can't discover without extensive reading) what data has been gathered, whether it will be anaonymous, whether I can opt to withdraw etc.
Do you see where I'm going here...?
I really don't think the UW guys are going to be abusing this data, and they're doing it to protect us - I'm not feeling particularly violated and, hell, I love the smell of irony in the morning - but what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander/if you're standing on the moral high ground it helps to be wearing appropriate footwear/people who throw stones shouldn't build glass houses (er, that's enough aphorisms...) - this sort of thing could be picked up by the bad guys to smear the research.
The page really should link to a front page explaining what they're doing with a large, friendly "yes - I want to participate" button.
(Speaking as someone who's just had to submit a long, silly ethical clearance form for a completely innocuous research project, presumably on the grounds that anybody planning to seriously abuse their experimental subjects would be honest enough to point this out on the form...)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Why on Earth are we allowing anybody to read this traffic?
All new programs really need point to point encryption built in by default. As in, I want to design a new {whatever}: In programming I first decide how to secure the connection and encrypt the data. Second, I decide what I'm going to transfer, then the interface.
Post cards eventually led to folded paper with a wax seal to the letter inside a sealed envelope. Where is the same standard of privacy in Internet Clients that I expect when I mail something as simple as a greeting card?
Once Point to Point Encryption becomes the standard in all package design if the government wants to intercept and read my communications they'll have to do what the law says they have to do... Get a warrant. The same goes for my ISP or anyone else for that matter.
There's a reason all Internet use should be considered public. We're all shouting at the top of our lungs. Right now all they have to do is stand close enough to eavesdrop on a public communication that's out in the open.
Most of us on SlashDot are in the industry designing these Clients. Rather than complain, when you write your next Client why not design it securely?
-[d]-
Names are powerful.
If an ISP modifies a web page, they are tampering. Putting their own ads there is impersonation
If an ISP puts your IP at the top of a RST they generated, they are packet forging.
If an ISP examines the data portion of a packet they are reading your content.
If they change the header (other than decrementing TTL or doing NAT) they are packet tampering.
And if they say it's to enhance user experience they are lying
This is not my sandwich.
Commies as in common carriers.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!