Slashdot Mirror
Encrypted Traffic No Longer Safe From Throttling
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."
They could just throttle all encrypted packets for free.
Can anyone explain to me why any ISP would use this technique? If they start looking at packet sizes to determine different kinds of encrypted traffic then the packets will just be padded, causing their network to be further overloaded...
Not really, they're providers of the medium and have no business limiting or snooping the datat that goes through their network especially since they were often granted a monopoly over building infrastructure in their area.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Even without this analysis it was kinda obvious that throttle-happy ISPs would simply throttle all encrypted data once encrypting became mainstream in P2P.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
You can identify the type of traffic, because we're not trying very hard to hide it. If you keep going down this road, we'll just send all the time, the same constant packet size, the same rate, regardless of actually required service. It's the same to us, really, because we pay a flat price. It is not the same to you, though, because when we have to make every traffic look the same, we'll use much more of your precious bandwidth, so cut out the crap.
All its going to do is encourage P2P developers to try (and they will likely succeed) to make P2P traffic look more like other traffic. Want your bittorent to look more like encrypted telnet? Easy send tons of tiny packets and take a short break every few seconds. All this is going to do is increase the packet overhead the ISPs see. That same overhead will also hurt P2P end users but unless its more then the throttle does they will do it anyone. Its a loose loose situation really. They ISPs should realize they gain nothing going down this path.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
And throttle all encrypted traffic over whatever an IP phone or VPN connection would use on assumption of file-sharing. They don't give a rat's ass what you are doing, really, they just want a reason to throttle you and this company just makes money by giving them one.
How about:
Not a solution to defeat ISPs attempts to control what's going through the government-funded, monopoly-protected, public-land-using network.
You're right, facts do change the interpretation.
Well, the next move would simply be some tool, or modification to bittorrent, that makes the traffic patterns look like that of other protocols. While I'm sure it would have some impact upon performance, surely torrent packets can be make to look pretty damn similar to a bunch of HTTPS images being loaded on a web page (or something along those lines). Just like DRM, each move like this isn't solving any problem, just slowing things down, while a counter-move is made. (Or, another provider is chosen who doesn't throttle traffic, competition permitting.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Do you understand that ISPs are not exactly charity organizations, don't you? I am paying for their service and I expect it to work as it was advertised in their offer.
If these policies where openly documented, and there where truly free competition, I'd agree with you; let the market sort it out.
That typically isn't the case. First, these policies are rarely documented at all, and if they are, it's in language so vague as to make it useless for purposes of comparing one ISP to another. ("We may, at our discretion, at various times, perform adjustments to packet-priority")
Free competition is also the exception rather than the rule. A huge fraction of end-user-lines where built by telcos acting as a government-granted monopoly, and then they somehow got to keep a large piece of this after the monopolies are no longer in principle monopolies. Which means in many areas they are still in -practice- pretty close to monopolies.
And even where they're not, competition is low and that will remain so. Few people have more than 2, perhaps 3 physical cables coming in that are suitable for broadband. (many have a twisted-pair copper that used to be for POTS and a coax that used to be for analogue-cable, and that's it, extra bonus if the old monopolist owns the tv-cable in your area!)
This ain't gonna change. A single modern cable has moder than enough capacity for all needs, so it's not economically sensible to have a large number of competitive cable-networks.
Really, last-mile networks should be owned and run by the neighbourhoods, or failing that atleast be considered infrastructure, really today a working broadband-connection is basic infrastructure like electric power, water, sewage and roads. (it's not -equally- crucial as those, but it's crucial nevertheless, I doubt a house with -no- telecom-connection of any sort would find many buyers)
Wireless changes the picture a bit, for low-bandwith applications. But only a bit. The problem is that the RF-spectrum is fundamentally shared, thus it will not be possible to deliver the same speeds and reliability as is possible on physical cable. (a single single-mode fibre easily supports speeds up atleast a Tbps or thereabouts which is more than most people need for the next few decades)
Not a solution to defeat ISPs attempts to control, what's going through networks they constructed with large sums of both public and private money they mortgaged against providing a service to their customers, not fighting against them.
Yup, sure do.
Attempts to analyze (and then throttle) Internet traffic reminds me of copy protection schemes. The schemes get more and more complicated (and costly) and at every turn the user gets more sophisticated in his or her attempts to get around the protection. ISPs would be wise to look at the music, movie, and in particular video game industries and realize that there are many, many more users who wish to use P2P software than there are ISP engineers who wish to throttle said users, and that it will always be a losing battle.
Personally, I think the granularity of the ISP payment schemes need to be increased. We pay for cell phone minutes in blocks of 100 or so (or by the minute, depending on your plan); we pay for electricity by the kWH, we pay for water by the gallon (or liter), and so on... why not pay for bandwidth by the Mb? In a perfect world (yeah, well, one can dream!) this would mean reduced costs for the average home Internet user, as most people aren't using anywhere close to what is available, and maybe slightly increased costs for people like me. But then at the same time throttling is no longer an issue. Of course in reality this is unlikely to happen any time soon; why charge responsible, realistic rates when you could charge a flat fee and then just block any traffic you don't like with increasingly expensive technology (and pass the cost on to your monthly subscribers, of course)?
ISPs, learn from the "War on Copyright Violation" - you won't win this battle; give it up and fix the underlying problem.
There is another weakness in BT which allows ISP's to throttle traffic. Client to tracker communications. Unless your tracker uses SSL, all peers inside a swarm are send over in the clear. So your ISP knows which IPs are likely to send and receive BT-traffic. They don't have to look at the traffic, they just use the same information the tracker provided to you. IP in BT-swarm? Throttle.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
Funny, when I began using their service they never told me they would throttle certain protocols. They said they'd give me access to the internet at certain speeds to the best of their ability. Throttling packets seemed to be significantly below their best.
See the user. See the user after 1 hour. See how many bytes up and down. Check how many different IP destinations the user is connected with.
:)
Errrr, if they are using VPN then they will have 1 IP destination, to the company that's providing the VPN (think SecureIX or Relakks)
If they aren't downloading or uploading much, why throttle?
well, of course, we could all just buy an overpriced brardband connection and just not use it. At all. Then we could confidently boast that our connections are never getting throttled and happily invite people to look long and hard at how fucking good we are.
As it happens, we bought our net connections for a reason.
And while Iâ(TM)m at it, does anyone notice that the same ISP's that are most inclined to throttle you (or even report you to the music industry) are the ones who *still* advertise their service by boasting how many music/video files you can download in an hour?
Moreover, isn't there a simple workaround in padding your ssh/scp packets and adding a random 10% chance of +1-25ms delay between packets?
The extra random delay might help a little, but adding padding would just make it more likely to get flagged for throttling.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr