Slashdot Mirror
TCP/IP Might Have Been Secure From the Start If Not For the NSA
chicksdaddy writes: "The pervasiveness of the NSA's spying operation has turned it into a kind of bugaboo — the monster lurking behind every locked networking closet and the invisible hand behind every flawed crypto implementation. Those inclined to don the tinfoil cap won't be reassured by Vint Cerf's offhand observation in a Google Hangout on Wednesday that, back in the mid 1970s, the world's favorite intelligence agency may have also stood in the way of stronger network layer security being a part of the original specification for TCP/IP. (Video with time code.) Researchers at the time were working on just such a lightweight cryptosystem. On Stanford's campus, Cerf noted that Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman had researched and published a paper that described the functioning of a public key cryptography system. But they didn't yet have the algorithms to make it practical. (Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman published the RSA algorithm in 1977). As it turns out, however, Cerf did have access to some really bleeding edge cryptographic technology back then that might have been used to implement strong, protocol-level security into the earliest specifications of TCP/IP. Why weren't they used? The crypto tools were part of a classified NSA project he was working on at Stanford in the mid 1970s to build a secure, classified Internet. 'At the time I couldn't share that with my friends,' Cerf said."
National Insecurity Agency
It would be utterly obsolete by now and would just be a legacy function that would have to be supported for legacy apps and would be a security swiss cheese. TCP is better off just being a pure transport later protocol with modern crypto layered on top.
It's true, that had the NSA chosen to share that info, we could have had better security. On the other hand, the NSA were the ones that developed it, so if not for the NSA, it would not have existed to use.
If TCP/IP had included crypto, we'd all be using IPX now days...
The reason TCP/IP proliferated was because it was light-weight and easy to implement. Crypto would have killed that.
If TCP/IP had encryption way back when, it never would have worked because it's too slow. Shit, stuff was so slow that people turned off checksumming. Imagine having to do something exciting, like actual encryption. It'd be worse than running a 300 baud modem.
We used to use telnet, ftp and uucp, those weren't secure or encrypted.
The internet used to be open and free, owned by no one.
It's a stretch to think they wanted to do encryption from the start.
The headline is horribly horribly misleading. I hope people at least RTFS.
I read the summary, and it seems to be aligned with the headline:
Vint Cerf's offhand observation in a Google Hangout on Wednesday that, back in the mid 1970s, the world's favorite intelligence agency may have also stood in the way of stronger network layer security being a part of the original specification for TCP/IP
Oh, by the way, "bleeding edge cryptographic technology" is something you never ever want to use.
It was "bleeding edge" in 1975 back when TCP/IP itself was still in its infancy, but would have been refined over time.
Rather misleading article and slant there. It implies that the NSA deliberately took action to make TCP/IP insecure. However, in reality, the NSA merely didn't contribute their classified work towards the specification of TCP/IP. And frankly, that's a good idea. The overhead of encryption at that time would have been too much. Additionally, cryptography only gets better with time, so whatever algorithm that would have been selected would have long since been obsolete. And due to backwards compatibility, would still have to be implemented. After all, things like routers and such are a tad more difficult to update than programs.
Encryption can be applied at various layers. You can have link-layer encryption (level 2), network-layer encryption such as IPSec (level 3), transport-layer encryption such as SSL (level 4) and application-layer encryption such as SSH (layer 7)
I have been lately doing some reading about the networking abstraction layers and I do not see why TCP and IP could not have been created as single layer. Comments?
The big stack of the OSI model sometimes makes me cringe also in general and I wonder if we are just wasting bandwidth with the various encapsulated headers.
the world's favorite intelligence agency may have also stood in the way of stronger network layer security
But that is misleading. The NSA did not "stand in the way". The just declined to help. That is not the same thing.
the world's favorite intelligence agency may have also stood in the way of stronger network layer security
But that is misleading. The NSA did not "stand in the way". The just declined to help. That is not the same thing.
The research existed, Cerf had access to it, but they didn't allow it to be used.
If your house is burning down and the fire chief prevents you from using the fire hydrant in front of your house even though you have the right equipment to hook up to it, wouldn't you say he's standing in the way? He's not just declining to help, he's actively preventing you from using tools and knowledge that you have because he's afraid that other people will see you do it and then they'll know how to fight their own fires.
The headline is horribly horribly misleading. I hope people at least RTFS.
Exactly. This isn't a "would have been" that failed because of NSA involvement. This is a "would not have been" that failed all on its own. The NSA had some confidential tools at its disposal that may have been able to salvage the idea, but them not sharing their tools is hardly a reason for us to be shaking our fists and saying "it would have worked if not for them". It's like blaming a toll road for your late arrival after choosing to take public streets instead of the toll road. It makes no sense.
It also at the time would be been considered a state secret. Until the late 90s publishing any of a huge number of crypto tools to the international community was illegal. So even if he had permission to publish this research to the US, it couldn't be given out internationally. That's not the "NSA"s decision, that's was much higher up than them.
Okay, that does it!
I know you dudes-in-black are hiding flying cars powered by Mr. Fusion, and the pickled Roswell aliens.
Hand 'em over! Hoffa too!
(But take Lady Gaga back, please)
Table-ized A.I.
grumble grumble
NSA.
For everything that's wrong... blame them.
It's not that our society is failing, that our voters are mentally obese and thus always pick the wrong option.
Nope, it's the NSA. NSA did this to you. You're the victim, not the perpetrator.
Keep saying it and maybe someday, you'll believe it.
Futurist Traditionalism
funny you should mention that. not exactly the same but http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3951...
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
[Citation needed]
Not that I don't believe you but there's a lot of assholes on the net nowadays.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
There were individuals and organizations back in the seventies and eighties that got in trouble with the US Government for writing and publishing software that used strong encryption. The problem was that the published code was visible from outside the US and ran afoul of ITAR regulation (citation: check the history of PGP). Incorporating strong encryption in TCP/IP would have made its use and adoption subject to US ITAR regulation.
The only way to hide traffic path is through partial-information relaying - the Tor approach. Nasty overhead. But even the most pathetic payload encryption would really make a huge difference - it would mean tapping all traffic at a trunk would require dynamically following hundreds of thousands of conversations betweeen tens of thousands of nodes. The NSA could do it, a lot of smaller governments couldn't.
Also, even a DH key exchange without any public key authentication at all is still somewhat effective: Yes, it can be MITMed with ease, but such an attack is also very detectable if you have a side channel, which means any untargetted mass-monitoring operations would be swiftly noticed.
Agreed! Thanks for posting the response. So quick to dog the NSA (for good reason) but this is a bulshite headline.
Bob Metcalf dubbed him "Darth Cerf".
Some people do the right thing and damn the personal cost.
http://www.ted.com/talks/edwar...
Need Mercedes parts ?
I'd imagine if the NSA did have their hands in helping to secure internet communications, every country would have been up in arms last year, and the internet would be completely fractured by now.
Their non-involvement was a good thing, not a bad thing. Now, we currently know there are better things that can be done to secure the internet, but not having implemented them yet does not mean things are bad right now either.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Like PGP?
Pffft.
Anyway, it's not too late:
http://vimeo.com/18279777
(Skip the first 14 minutes of chair-shuffling)
Need Mercedes parts ?
I've got my own implementation that is OSI compatible. But given I answered more than half of the RFCs and had over 30% of those comments implemented, I'm still a father.
Oh, you wanted a name? No, sir. Do that work for yourself.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Whenever I hear anti-NSA rhetoric, I ask: imagine the same things being said about Alan Turing et al working to decode Germans' messages... Would Mr. Snowden receive the same respect and adoration, if he published the secrets of Bletchley Park in 1943?
How about the horrible "privacy invasion" that provided for intercepting of Zimmerman's telegram.
Not excusing everything NSA is doing these days, but putting things in perspective...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Exaclty. Kind of like saying my home-A-bomb project for the kids science fair was ruined by the DOE not letting me take the secret plans home from work.
It's more like: If your neighbour's house is on fire, and you don't lend him this equipment. It's not really standing in the way.
It's not also the right thing to do, but the fire seemed much smaller by the time, and you were paranoid that people would steal your equipment.
Rethinking email
This is a classic solved problem in computer science: chose an algorithm that you can support in the generation of machines you plan to deploy, even if it's slow in the lab.
MIT specified an amazing fast processor for Project Athena, an entire 1 MIPS. Unheard of! Of course, it was perfectly normal when Athena rolled out. [Origin: the guys there explaining we could use the DEC 2100s we already had at York if we wanted to deploy Athena]
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
The research existed, Cerf had access to it, but they didn't allow it to be used.
The research would not have existed if not for the NSA. So how might TCP/IP have been secure from the start if not for them?
the world's favorite intelligence agency may have also stood in the way of stronger network layer security
But that is misleading. The NSA did not "stand in the way". The just declined to help. That is not the same thing.
Maybe by your standards. Kind of like being next to someone who's breathing machine came unplugged, yet you refuse to help by walking over and plugging it in. At some point, in-action is as bad as action. Those with the power to easily help with no risk or effort, yet don't, are just as bad as those who purposefully are bad.
If NSA would have been involved in making TCP/IP would people have used it?
There is a lot of hate being spewed at the NSA these days. Totally ridiculous title that needs to be changed by a Slashdot moderator.
Wow, it's always a tough competition, but this may win "Ridiculous Slashdot Headline Of The Week".
Logic 101, folks. Let's recap that headline:
"TCP/IP Might Have Been Secure From the Start If Not For the NSA"
Now, what's the story here? One of TCP/IP's designers had access to some then-bleeding-edge crypto *that was part of an NSA project*, but couldn't include it in TCP/IP because it was secret.
Now, can we support the idea that "if not for the NSA" that crypto could have gone into TCP/IP? No, because "if not for the NSA" that crypto *wouldn't have fucking existed at all*. The NSA wrote it. So the choices are "code written, but not available for use" or "code not written at all". Practical difference for the purposes of TCP/IP: zip.
Google claims the moral high ground of protecting privacy while at the same time maximizing profits by exploiting your web activity.
Companies like Facebook mine all of your posts for the purpose of targeting advertising to get you, or your friends, to buy products and services - that you honestly do not need
Companies are getting hacked left and right and your personal information and credit cards are getting stolen.
All of this is going on and yet Slashdot posters continue to assail government agencies? Amazing.
It was artifically expensive due to all encryption technology declared to be munitions. Thus no one was allowed to research it.
RSA was known (pre-release) around 1975 (I was shown the paper by my professor).
As for speed - not bad. The original RSA was defined for 32 bit and 64 bit keys - just like DES (well, DES was limited to 56 bit keys being aimed at either 7 8 bit bytes or 8 7 bit ascii characters) . Neither was all that slow. RSA is always slower than symmetric key encryption, which is why all implementations actually only use RSA encryption to exchange random symmetric keys. Once the random keys are exchanged, those are used instead of RSA.
What delayed the general use of encryption was two things:
1. the definition of encryption as munitions
2. the patent on RSA delayed its use until the patent ran out.
Everyone cries about how insecure the X window protocol is... It wasn't. Originally the X code used encryption - but due to the encryption as munitions problem, MIT couldn't release the code for general use. They couldn't even leave the API hooks in it as that was ALSO declared to be part of the munitions. So all of it was removed.
"Those with the power to easily help with no risk or effort, yet don't, are just as bad as those who purposefully are bad."
Bullshit. This attitude is pervasive with people who have done little to help people themselves.
People who actually have experience with helping others are usually people who have also been punished for attempting to render assistance. If you have the ability to help the helpless and you decide to do so: more power to you. If you decide that no good deed goes unpunished and that it's best to live and let die: welcome to "enlightened self-interest". In contrast, "naive self-interest" is when you nurture the belief that helping others will buy you karma points with the big man in the clouds.
Chip on my shoulder? More than I can count. Jaded? More like realistic.
Next time you see someone getting chastised for trying to play the "Good-Samaritan" and you shy away from intervention or outrage: use that moment of introspection as an opportunity to liberate yourself from the delusion that you are a courageous individual, or that "Good-Deed's Go Unpunished".
You'll be less distressed at the state of the world when you realize how it got there, and as it so happens: the world doesn't smell so bad by comparison when you realize your shit doesn't smell like roses.
It would be one thing to encrypt all traffic end-to-end with a Diffie-Hellman exchange per TCP connection. But it would be quite another thing to prevent active attacks from three-letter agencies. You'd need a way to establish and ensure trust as well. If they can't decrypt the connection itself, they can use an active attack to intercept it and decrypt it. Even if the target is using SSL with PFS, they could always national-security-letter a signed certificate out of a CA in their jurisdiction. It doesn't really matter what security is employed; there will always be a way to defeat it. All we can do is make it harder.
Bad analogy.
The NSA didn't tell Cerf not to use this cryptography scheme. Cerf didn't even ask. He was working on a classified research project(NSA cryptography) and working on a unclassified academic experiment(TCP/IP).
I keep fish as a hobby. I have a friend who researches new antibiotics. Do you think my friend's employer is "standing in the way" when he doesn't give me the latest and most potent antibiotics which aren't even publicly available to treat my fish?
The people who invented TCP/IP weren't even thinking about security. The network they imagined was one that went between a few buildings on the same campus. Nobody dreamed of the need for security at that point, any more than Alexander Graham Bell was thinking about voice security when he invented the telephone.
The Internet was NEVER owned by no one.
It isn't a magic kingdom. It's hosted on servers and backbones that were *always* owned by someone(s). So the 'free as a bird' perspective is just blatant fantasy.
The earliest Internet tech was developed for DARPA/USGOV. It also appeared around the same time in academic uses. Neither of these was 'free' nor 'uncontrolled'.
It may have been not heavily policed in the early days, because nothing much of general public interest (or interest to the movers and shakers) was happening on the limited public Internet, but it sure as heck was all owned by someone.
I don't find it a stretch at all that engineers didn't consider encrypting for privacy and security at the start. It may not have been practical (either given public domain cryptosystems or hardware) but it may have been conceptually considered.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
You could encrypt content. That's something and the content could have been secure.
You are correct that encrypting routing encapsulation would be a whole other ball of wax, so who transactions were between may not have been protected.
Content would at least have been more private than it is today (until NSA used a big lever on hardware and software producers anyway).
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Someone uses it and the bugs get identified and resolved.
Every solid release came from buggy prototypes.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
TCP is transport layer. IP is not. (at least by the OSI model and I think the TCP model though I'm a bit rustier on that one - Network layer is IP)
There is no reason to imagine TCP/IP could not have included Session or higher level encryption protocols without really affecting the TCP or IP parts of the protocol stack. The design could well have been exactly as you suggest.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
The NSA has two conflicting tasks:
(1) Secure national communications.
(2) Break other countries communications.
This made sense in the 1950s when secure encryption was something only the military, spies, etc used. It breaks down badly in the internet, international era.
"They declined to help" hides the fact that _that was their job_. They are the national, even world experts on the problem, and they stood back
and allowed a broken internet security model. Elsewhere, they've made swiss cheese of encryption standards so they could continue to do (2),
at the cost of (1).
The NSA is Broken As Designed and needs to be scrapped.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
If TCP/IP had included crypto, we'd all be using IPX now days...
The reason TCP/IP proliferated was because it was light-weight and easy to implement. Crypto would have killed that.
There would have been more resistance to adopting it, too.
As it was, there was substantial resistance among people and institutions sited outside the US, because the Internet was a DARPA project, i.e. U.S. Military. Other countries, organizations within them, and even some people in the US, were concerned about things like what the US might be building in - like interception and backdoors for espionage and sabotage - or just because "Military! Bad!". Including encryption from the then officially nonexistent, deepest secret, communications spy agency would have boosted that resistance substantially.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I do not see why TCP and IP could not have been created as single layer.
That was one of the major divergences from other networking schemes of the time that gave TCP/IP an advantage.
IP is a lower layer than TCP. It's about getting the packet from router to router, and is as deep into the packet that core routers have to look to do their jobs. Core routers are supposed to be "as dumb as rocks", putting as little effort as practical into forwarding each packet, in order to get as many of these "hot potatoes" moved on as quickly as possible and keep the cost of the routers down (and to drop any given packet if there's any problem forwarding it).
TCP is one of several choices for the next layer up. It runs only at the endpoints of a link. It does several things, which are all about building a reliable, persistent, end-to-end connection out of the UNreliable, "best effort", IP transport mechanism. Among these things are:
- Breaking a stream up into packet-sized chunks.
- Creating reliability by hanging error detection on packets and saving a copy of the data until the far end acknowledges successful reception, retransmitting if necessary to replace lost or corrupted packets.
- Scheduling the launching of the packets so that the available bandwidth at bottlenecks is fairly divided among many TCP sessions, while as much of it is used as practical.
- Adding an out-of-band "urgent data", channel to the connection (for things like sending interrupts and control information).
Some other networking schemes of the time did this on a hop-by-hop basis, requiring much more work by the routers. TCP put it at the endpoints only.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
NO connection is point-to-point.
Most Internet communications are carried in packets with unique source address and unique destination address. Conceptually, it doesn't matter whether those packets are encoded with Point-to-Point Protocol on a serial cable, or whether they go through a bunch of routers first. A more pedantic term is unicast. So, the actual counterexample would be multicast, and despite best efforts, there's very little of that on the Internet.
The real exception to point-to-point communications is WAN acceleration, but I'm guessing that its effects are minor across the Internet.
Have a nice time.
There seems to be more NSA shills here now, using faulty logic to defend NSA, such as crypto being too slow then, and that it is right to withheld crypto.
The choice of using crypto on the net would have been nice to have back then, for stuff like protecting people, nations, businesses, even if the crypto was slow. So the job of NSA is obviously not to protect USA, but weaken it, and others. There were faster crypto back then, which of course also was weaker, but could have been strengthened by such methods as longer keys and hardware.
This is the same Vint Cerf who opined recently that "privacy may be an anomaly" and "[our] experience with privacy is a result of our own behavior".
It's precisely because such people are so keen to work on stuff they "couldn't share ... with friends" that their friends find themselves the target of what they've developed.
Also, even a DH key exchange without any public key authentication at all is still somewhat effective: Yes, it can be MITMed with ease, but such an attack is also very detectable if you have a side channel, which means any untargetted mass-monitoring operations would be swiftly noticed.
Perhaps a stupid question (not a crypto expert here), but if you have a not-easily-MITMed side channel, wouldn't you use that for key exchange? Or at least to verify the keys?
C - the footgun of programming languages
If you have the channel, yes. But in most situations, you don't.
Researchers or activists trying to detect censorship efforts do. It wouldn't take many people running checks to notice.
There have been many reformers over the years. Are you telling me they were all wrong?
You're ignoring the fact that the options presented reflect what is likely to succeed with the herd of voters. We the People are the enemy.
Futurist Traditionalism
If other reports are to be believed, the NSA actively sabotaged encryption standards like IPSEC. All they had to do was prevent something effective from being adopted and becoming widespread.
http://linux.slashdot.org/stor...
What do you do about countries like the US that still limit the export of strong encryption as a military munition? How about countries which will not permit their citizens access to such encryption? And how do you get the assorted governments of the world to agree upon and implement one standard? The internet isn't some kind of nationless paradise where information gamboles on the green and frolics in the sun. More like the Wild West, with shark-wielding lasers, hookers and blackjack thrown in.
The crypto tools were part of a classified NSA project he was working on at Stanford in the mid 1970s to build a secure, classified Internet. 'At the time I couldn't share that with my friends,' Cerf said."
Another one drops into my asshole category for working for intelligence/military/military contracting. And they probably almost all think they were "serving America".
Actually, it's more like 'You want to install a home security system. You're a solider. Why can't you take a tank home?'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Really dont like calling people out but youre pretty full of BS. By your own admission you do LED work growing Cannabis, which hardly relegates you to being an OSI expert, and when I google your name (initials: A. M.Q.) + OSI or RFC, nothing at all comes up.
According to your google+, you graduated HS around the same time I did, which means you were in middle school when the OSI model was formalized. It would be mightily impressive if you "wrote Layer 6" before entering high school.
Please, cut the BS.
I was one of the leading team members at System Development Corporation (SDC) in the 1970's on various secure operating system and secure networking projects for various US and UK governmental bodies.
Some of that work was classified, much was not.
In late 1974 David Kaufman and I were working on network security, particularly on the then monolithic TCP (there was at that time no formalized underlying datagram IP layer.) Among other things we were designing and building a multi-level secure nework, with multi-level verifiied secure switches/routers, for a goverment agency.
In our work we split an encrypted datagram layer off from the underside of TCP. Because of nature of packet ordering, packet loss, retransmissions, as well as aspects of various security algorithms this was not as straightforward as one might think.
What we came up with was a precursor to what are today encrypted VLANS, IPSEC, and key distribution infrastructures.
However, we were not able to publish our work widely. In fact now, 40 years later, there is scarcely anything visible on the public web. Even our work that was published via the then National Bureal of Standards (now NIST) is not easily found. (I have been searching for years for a copy of some work I did on debugging hooks for secure operating systems.)
We also worked on things like capability based computers and operating systems with formal verfication of security properties. During that time I designed and wrote what is aguably the first formally verified secure operating system.) That work, also, tends to remain hard to find.
Vint Cerf was a consultant to our group. He helped. But the major thrust and principle design work was done by our team at SDC.
The US Dept of Defense (which includes several agencies) funded much of this work - and really helped move things along - but their institutional resistence to wide publication meant that many of the ideas and implementations we did in the mid 1970's were invisible to most of the world until they were re-invented decades later.