Slashdot Mirror
Phorm, the Deep Packet Inspection Ad-Injector Company, Ceases Trading
Reader mccalli writes: Phorm, a controversial UK deep-packet inspection/ad-injection company discussed on Slashdot many times before, has ceased trading today. Phorm was controversial for, among other things, editing and approving UK government advice on privacy, offering hospitality to the police prior to a decision over prosecution, and being the subject of an EU investigation for its practices and close relationship with the then UK government. The Register has a more editorialized version of the news, but it is fair to say that Phorm will not be mourned by fans of internet privacy.
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Does deep packet inspection render https/ssl/ssh transparent to those with this technology or are my packets still keep private. I understand they can see src/dst, but can they see payload as well?
"Deep Packet Inspection" is a term of art in the design, manufacture, and sales of networking equipment. It refers to the ability of a networking device to parse, and make decisions on, more of the packet than the I.P. header.
The shallowest of "Deep Packet Inspection" would be to identify the protocol and/or service used (benignly: to adjust routing priorities: Fast but quick discard for streams, up to a limit, slower and lower priority but with more bandwidth available for file transfers, etc. Malevolently: to break file sharing protocols, especially when used by a customer who is consuming substantial capacity.)
But it can go as farther in from there as the capacity of the box allows. One use might be to recognize and filter out known spam or malware from email streams, as a service to the customer.
Routers are seas of risc processors with acceleration hardware, and Moore's law has applied to them as much as to silicon elsewhere in the computing infrastructure. Some of that has been applied to handling more packets. But much of it has been applied to being able to throw more general-purpose processor instructions at each packet.
You've seen what decades of following Moore's law has done for computing capability. Imagine what it has done for making routers - especially "edge routers", where are customer's packets come together and something useful can be done with them - smarter than the "dumb as rocks" hot-potato throwers of the backbone (and the original conception of the whole net).
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If HTTPS is easily broken into, then why exactly should everyone bother using it? Not everyone is running an e-commerce site; if you're just running a small informational site, why should you care about HTTPS?
This is something that I've never seen explained. The whole HTTPS-anywhere trend these days just seems like a dumb bandwagon that people are jumping on to make them look like they're clued-in and knowledgeable.
Multiple reasons:
(1) To stop intermediaries messing with your streams (e.g. adding ads, malware or "super-cookies" like Verizon did).
(2) It in general helps to minimize the useful information that intermediaries (like ISPs) can get from your data streams.
(3) It makes HTTPS for important data more secure in general because your important HTTPS stuff is obscured by all the other unimportant stuff which is also encrypted.