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.
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.
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.
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.