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Encrypted Traffic No Longer Safe From Throttling

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the didn't-think-it-was dept.

coderrr writes "New research could allow ISPs to selectively block or slow down your encrypted traffic even if they cannot snoop on your transmitted data. Italian researchers have found a way to categorize the type of traffic that is hidden inside an encrypted SSH session to around 90% accuracy. They are achieving this by analyzing packet sizes and inter-packet intervals instead of looking at the content itself. Challenges remain for ISPs to implement this technology, but it's clear that encrypting your traffic inside an SSH session or VPN connection is not a solution to protect net neutrality."

3 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Er, no. by Cave+Dweller · · Score: 5, Informative

    First, encrypted traffic was never safe from throttling anyway. Second, FTA:

    "So it seems the use of a tool like this would be limited to an extremely controlled environment where users are limited to a white-list set of network protocols (so that they can't use a different tunneling mechanism, stunnel for example) and only allowed to ssh to servers under the control of the censoring party. In which case you would wonder why the admin wouldn't just set the ssh server's AllowTcpForwarding option to false."

    Kinda useless.

  2. They can already throttle encrypted traffic. by Digital_Quartz · · Score: 5, Informative

    Could be worse. Rogers and Bell, here in Canada, just throttle ALL encrypted traffic.

  3. Re:Why bother? by cryptodan · · Score: 5, Informative

    how would this work for gaming online? 16 different IP destinations and I play for hours on in. My understanding of Xbox Live is that it is P2P and if they throttle my Halo 3 game, I'm gonna get pwned even more than normal.

    I totally agree. Steam creates a lot of connections to various content servers to bring down content faster for the Steam Client. It also creates a shitload of traffic when you refresh the server list via Steam Clinet > Servers Tab. The Steam Client is also P2P by definition.

    Now this type of throttling would piss me off greatly.