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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.'"
They don't want any of US to have access to such technology when THEY slap the monitoring devices on our network.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Of course there can be a billion reasons as to why some packets will take longer than others to reach their destinations.
However, if you do enough sampling over a period of time, you can make averages and see if some types/destinations of packets are possibly being messed with.
It's not perfect, but neither are averages in general, etc.
What makes it newsworthy is that such a simple idea was granted a patent.
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.
This is another example of the broken patent system. No government should be able to patent something--that technology was funded by the taxpayer and should thus be owned by the taxpayer, meaning that it is public and thus not patentable.
I killed my spent mod points to respond to this. I have no problems with the gov't patenting something, just as long as they don't use it to prevent people from using it in a positive manner. It's possible the gov't patented this so they could share the information with other people and not worry about some private company patenting the idea and then sueing everyone else for us it. Basically - patent to allow people to use it. In this case we don't have to look at the gov't for being evil, but maybe the gov't is protecting us from companies who like to create submarine patents?
Instead of looking at everything the gov't does and say "but it's evil because big brother did it", let's give them the benefit of the doubt.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Looking at the article, (and having skimmed but not read all of the patent), isn't AntiSniff (released by DilDog of L0pht in 1999) using this technique? (Slashdot article, Aug '99)
Original tech paper was on l0pht.com (now defunct) - looks like archive.org doesn't have a mirror, here's the best copy I could find in Google: http://servv89pn0aj.sn.sourcedns.com/~gbpprorg/l0pht/antisniff/tech-paper.html
o/~ Join us now and share the software
i remember a while back a firend of mine that workd for a college was tasked with trying to find a person who was sniffing peoples logins on the campus wifi.. what he ended up doing was sending out garbled truncated packets - turns out that windows boxes running things like etheral would get the truncated packet and then request the rest of the packet even though it wasn't addressed to them.. very clever way of finding the stupid ones.. luckly the person they where after was stupid
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'