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NSA Patents a Way To Spot Network Snoops
narramissic writes "The National Security Agency has patented a technique for figuring out whether someone is messing with your network by measuring the amount of time it takes to send different types of data and sounding an alert if something takes too long. 'The neat thing about this particular patent is that they look at the differences between the network layers,' said Tadayoshi Kohno, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Washington. But IOActive security researcher Dan Kaminsky wasn't so impressed: 'Think of it as — if your network gets a little slower, maybe a bad guy has physically inserted a device that is intercepting and retransmitting packets. Sure, that's possible. Or perhaps you're routing through a slower path for one of a billion reasons.'"
Or perhaps you're routing through a slower path for one of a billion reasons.
I knew taking that left turn at Albuquerque was a bad idea...
Uh oh, someone stole the plans for the NSA Tape Dispenser, it is missing from their Domestic Technology Transfer Program website! http://www.nsa.gov/techtrans/techt00075.cfm
these false positives really begin to add up. Couple this will all the lame-brained terrorist detection schemes that create millions of false positives and we can see the plan to get America out of recession is to have every single citizen working for the government hunting snipe.
Nah. What makes it newsworthy is that the snoops are patenting tools which can detect their own snoopage.
Counter-snooping this way is now a patent infringement as well as anything else, and the laws seem much tougher for that crime. Pursue 'em for one thing, nail 'em to the wall with another.
"NSAapp: Latency change detected in segment AA23. No idea what it might mean. Send the intern."
I'm guessing this is what Steve Ballmer fantasizes about while he makes love to his wife
What if it was funded by loans from China?
Fixed that for ya'.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Try a more recent tax form - proving you paid taxes more recently than 909 years ago is unlikely to impress them.
siphoning off date...
What? They could hack a government agency but they couldn't figure out NTP? I call shenanigans.
From what I understand, they have a couple of honest people working at both places.