Slashdot Mirror
Pakistan Bans Encryption
An anonymous reader writes "After some rumors of this last month, Pakistan has now officially told all of the country's ISPs that they need to block all encrypted VPNs since content running over such services cannot be monitored by the government."
How can one detect if a packet is encrypted? How do you distinguish unencrypted binary data from encrypted binary data?
By checking the "encrypted" bit in the TCP/IP packet header. It's right next to the "evil" bit.
The enemies of Democracy are
Save yourselves some money and some bother, and just disconnect yourselves from the internet! That way you'll be Safe (tm).
This has just prevented pretty much anyone who works for a Fortune 500 company from doing anything in Pakistan on company laptops. I dunno, maybe that's a good thing? I can imagine that now more than one "elected official" will point to Pakistan as a shining example to follow (just like what happened earlier with RIM and the Blackberry in India and Saudi Arabia and later everywhere) and VPNs will no longer be allowed because of course they could be the tools of terrorists. Damn, why did I have to wake up in this parallel universe 10 years ago.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Yeah, this is pretty much an unwinnable arms race. No matter how much deep packet inspection brute-force they want to employ - If they allow any protocols at all to run unrestricted, it'll be possible to tunnel data over it. Hell, give me an ICMP-only network and I'll encode data payloads into the TTL numbers.
Pakistan is gonna have to cut off its Internet backbones entirely if it's serious about shutting down encrypted communication.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
What about digital signatures?
eCommerce using SSL?
Password-protected files?
OS passwords?
Wearing pants should always be optional.
If all encryption is being banned, then it should make it trivial to start stealing passwords and bank card numbers from Pakistanis. We don't have an extradition treaty with them do we? Ready, set, crack!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
They won't have anymore telecommuters. One of our workers awhile back was resident in pakistan. No way are we going to let our data over the wire in the clear, so we can't hire from there anymore.
Iran has been accused of jamming satellite connections in the past, as has Libya. The US apparently has the capability.
As for how it's possible, Wikipedia has a brief description of the process. Because of the satellite's distance, it's signal is relatively weak when it reaches the ground (you're familiar with the inverse-square law, right?). A terrestrial broadcast will be much stronger and can drown out the signal from the satellite.
(reposting this because I forgot to login. whoops)