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New Tool Promises To Passively ldentify BitTorrent Files
QuietR10t writes "A new technique has been developed for detecting and tracking illegal content transferred using the BitTorrent file-trading protocol. According to its creators, the approach can monitor networks without interrupting the flow of data and provides investigators with hard evidence of illicit file transfers. 'Our system differs in that it is completely passive, meaning that it does not change any information entering or leaving a network,' says Schrader." I wonder if it can specifically identify legal content, too.
I'm assuming this has no chance of defeating encrypted connections?
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
For the record, I have a rule in my iptables that specifically turns off the "evil bit" in any of outgoing packets. Thank God for Linux! =)
And my $200 24 port gigabit switch from Dell will do it. And that's a cheap piece of crap. For the 3 of you who don't already know, You specify one port on the switch to receive a copy of all traffic on the entire switch, a vlan or a specific port. Then you can hook etherial to that port and monitor all of the traffic without modifying the original. OOOOhhhh, magic eh?
Anyway, even after I RTFA, I still didn't see anything that this thing does that my cheap port and a P2 running etherial couldn't do.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
I wish people would stop repeating this urban legend. ISPs do NOT have common carrier status. I wish they did, but they don't.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
More restrictions on content? More encryption.
Better cracking techniques? Better encryption.
Tyrannical government? Revolution.
Another drawback is that the system cannot cope with encrypted files. "Today, about 25 percent of BitTorrent traffic is encrypted," says Schulze. If such a tool became widely used, then anyone with something to hide would almost certainly switch to using encryption, he says.
If you make breathing illegal, only criminals with breath.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
So, you're telling me that, given a set of hashes corresponding to "Prohibited content" and access to all the packets moving across a network, you can detect prohibited content? Why, it's a miracle of science!
Seriously, this is news? It has been possible, with the complicity of the router or physical access to the wire, to unobtrusively and undetectably tap a network since forever. That isn't news. And being able to identifiy files whose hashes you have ahead of time? Also not news, especially since bittorrent uses hashes extensively itself, and was never designed for subtlety or concealment.
I realize that Technology Review lost interest in technology years ago, and now spends most of its time fellating venture capitalists; but this is pathetic.
If I read the article correctly, what they're really doing is looking at the BitTorrent infohash, which is used when communicating with the tracker and other peers to identify the torrent. (The infohash uniquely identifies the torrent.) Having a different infohash for each peer would require significant BitTorrent reengineering, I would think.
However, it's defeated by encryption, cannot legally be used in the U.S. or Europe by ISPs, and relies on a blacklist of illicit torrents.
They SHOULD. As long as they do not alter or supply content themselves.
The whole concept of common carrier was to account for services such as ISPs. Of course telephone systems were the first real examples, but the concept is still the same: a communications channel, where a service can carry those communications from point to point, without altering, supplying, or monitoring content.
I know of no logical reason why ISPs should not be "common carriers". They are ideal candidates to be. As long as they keep their fat fingers off the content.
And THEY should be in support of the concept, because if they cannot claim the "common carrier defense" (i.e., no responsibility for content), then they have some very heavy legal liability issues that common carriers do not have to deal with.
He probably read page 2 of the article,.
So... they invented packet sniffing?
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
In theory, they could attack encryption with man-in-the-middle during the key exchange
In theory, isn't this (or shouldn't this) all be illegal under wiretapping laws anyway?
As a private citizen I don't have the right to start monitoring my neighbors phone calls (even if those calls are broadcast into my house without encryption) just because I suspect she is dealing drugs. What gives my ISP the right to start monitoring my packets just because they suspect I'm pirating something?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The short story: There's more to being a common carrier than lack of liability, and ISPs don't want it. ISPs have liability protections under USC 17512 which are very strong and thus under heavy lobbying attack, but they are *not* repsponsible for content today. Read it yourself, it's surprisingly clear.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
New York State Penal Law:
250.05 Eavesdropping.
A person is guilty of eavesdropping when he unlawfully engages in wiretapping, mechanical overhearing of a conversation, or intercepting or accessing of an electronic communication.
Eavesdropping is a class E felony.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
That's a lot of "we could"s. How about just using the global OpenPGP WoT, and stopping the problem in its tracks?
Once you have a distributed authentication system (which is what lets you exchange keys safely), email is just one of the applications you can build on it. Sounds like you guys have another. Whatever. The more things it's used for (the more people who connect to the WoT) the better it works for everyone.
Quit building a redundant but also specialized infrastructure, and instead, join the original.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Usenet probably counts as a cache under section 512(b) of the DMCA; as long as ISPs process takedown notices correctly they have no liability. Also see ALS Scan v. Remarq. IANAL.
This doesn't identify someone downloading a file via bittorrent, it identifies someone downloading a *.bittorrent file (presumably via http).
This is a non-issue. If anyone actually starts using this, trackers will just start using shttp for their torrent files. They're small and (relatively) low traffic, so it would be a negligible performance issue.
The only notable thing about this article is that it points out how clueless tech journalists really are.
The reason ISP's are not common carriers dates back to dial-up modem Internet. The Telco's wanted to charge ISP's by the minute just like they do long-distance carriers for access to their network. The FCC got involved in this and used AOL as a model. AOL had these huge caching servers so AOL customer's web page requests rarely went out onto the Internet; instead they were served from the caches. So the FCC ruled that ISP's were delivering content and were not themselves carriers.
The Telcos are now (with broadband) satisfied with the content provider status as it saves them a lot of headaches, fees and taxes on their own Internet services. Broadband is far closer to a carrier service than a content service, but I don't see thing changing.
You think I don't understand this?
If you read the content of USC 17512 yourself, you will see that it addresses exactly the same kind of protections that I stated, and that if they do alter or supply the content, they lose the protection of the law. While this does not directly pertain to actual, "official" common carrier status, this is still often referred to as the "common carrier defense", since the principal is exactly the same. Why did YOU not know that?
In any case, since that is out of the way: what are these other reasons that you assert are the cause of ISPs not wanting to be common carriers? That is more to the point.
This is a very good point and part of what I was saying. I see no ACTUAL difference between what were once known as "common carriers" and ISPs, EXCEPT that they seem to want to provide content.
However, here in the U.S., the government (the FCC in particular) has historically been adamant about keeping carriers and content separate, largely because of the danger of monopolistic practices on the part of a corporation that was both the content carrier and the content provider. Another concern was that if carriers (which tend to be large and centric) controlled content as well, there would be too much control over services like news, for example. And I see no logical reason that policy should change, considering that the concerns are at least as valid today as back when the policy was first formulated, decades ago.
Usenet probably counts as a cache under section 512(b) of the DMCA; as long as ISPs process takedown notices correctly they have no liability.
alt.binaries.takedownnotices?
Can someone please explain to me how they plan to view the files of encrypted traffic without it being illegal?
...or, you know, just be plain illegal due to attempting to access people's personal files.
One would think that if they happen to decrypt anything with copyright protection that it would then violate the DCMA, as per various ridiculous recent rulings of the sort.
DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
If you read the article, you know the answer to these questions.
They plan to sniff for the hash, of course, and compare it to a list of hashes for "forbidden files".
It's not new technology - the same approach is used in China (according to the article).
And no, I don't think this is legal in the EU (not yet at least), and certainly not in the U.S., as it requires sniffing through everybody's stuff, regardless of what they're downloading.