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Vint Cerf on Differential Traceability on the Internet (acm.org)
Addressing the bad behaviors on the Internet, that range from social network bullying and misinformation to email spam, distributed denial of service attacks, direct cyberattacks against infrastructure, malware propagation, identity theft, and a host of other ills require a wide range of technical and legal considerations, says Vint Cerf, even as he steers clear that he supports encryption. But is there a way to bring more accountability and traceability on our actions on the internet without compromising our privacy? He has a proposition: What is of interest to me is a concept to which I was introduced at the Ditchley workshop, specifically, differential traceability. The ability to trace bad actors to bring them to justice seems to me an important goal in a civilized society. The tension with privacy protection leads to the idea that only under appropriate conditions can privacy be violated. By way of example, consider license plates on cars. They are usually arbitrary identifiers and special authority is needed to match them with the car owners (unless, of course, they are vanity plates like mine: "Cerfsup"). This is an example of differential traceability; the police department has the authority to demand ownership information from the Department of Motor Vehicles that issues the license plates. Ordinary citizens do not have this authority.
In the Internet environment there are a variety of identifiers associated with users (including corporate users). Domain names, IP addresses, email addresses, and public cryptography keys are examples among many others. Some of these identifiers are dynamic and thus ambiguous. For example, IP addresses are not always permanent and may change (for example, temporary IP addresses assigned at Wi-Fi hotspots) or may be ambiguous in the case of Network Address Translation. Information about the time of assignment and the party to whom an IP address was assigned may be needed to identify an individual user. There has been considerable debate and even a recent court case regarding requirements to register users in domain name WHOIS databases in the context of the adoption of GDPR. If we are to accomplish the simultaneous objectives of protecting privacy while apprehending those engaged in harmful or criminal behavior on the Internet, we must find some balance between conflicting but desirable outcomes.
In the Internet environment there are a variety of identifiers associated with users (including corporate users). Domain names, IP addresses, email addresses, and public cryptography keys are examples among many others. Some of these identifiers are dynamic and thus ambiguous. For example, IP addresses are not always permanent and may change (for example, temporary IP addresses assigned at Wi-Fi hotspots) or may be ambiguous in the case of Network Address Translation. Information about the time of assignment and the party to whom an IP address was assigned may be needed to identify an individual user. There has been considerable debate and even a recent court case regarding requirements to register users in domain name WHOIS databases in the context of the adoption of GDPR. If we are to accomplish the simultaneous objectives of protecting privacy while apprehending those engaged in harmful or criminal behavior on the Internet, we must find some balance between conflicting but desirable outcomes.
Without all the tracking and authoritarian features they've been crying for all these decades. Why do we suddenly need them now?
"Ordinary citizens do not have this authority."
Most people in my state don't know, but a person can go to the Department of Transportation, fill out a form, and get the registration info for a license plate. It used to be the requester could remain anonymous, but after a woman was stalked and, as I recall, killed, the requester information is required and confirmed with a gov issued ID. The police determined the stalker obtained her address from DoT. None of this changes Cerf's basic idea. That said, people of any political persuasion can list governments they would not trust with this power. If it is not the government that has the power, who would have it?
Nothing wrong with that... but, given the subject being discussed, it’s something to keep in mind when reading his opinion regarding tracking and privacy.
#DeleteChrome
Considering the government's efforts with license plate readers precisely because they're the only ones with the power to demand ownership information from the DMV, isn't this a great example of the whole problem with trying to introduce traceability? It's become very clear that computers not only allow for the rapid automation of use but also the rapid automation of abuse. Attach that to a global communication network, and you offer pervasive rapid automation of abuse. It stands to reason with that in mind, you want to take steps to reduce traceability as a necessary step towards resilience from the pervasive adversaries, not only to those endowed with authority but those who would bribe, mole, or engineer their way into that authority.
tl;dr - We need to take more steps towards protecting users, not trying to out villains. Computers are the one space where that's a much more doable option than most.
Consider the following:
Facebook: OK, now that we're in the future where Vint Cerf's special differential traceability magic has come to pass, we've identified the IP addresses that these election meddlers were using to connect to their VPNs. Now, to unmask the villains...
Roskomnadzor: Those IP addresses do not exist.
Facebook: But--
Roskomnadzor: Fifty years gulag!
Vladimir Putin: Fifty years gulag!
Donald Trump: So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.
This is where we already are. Improving the paper trail won't fix anything that needs fixing.
"What is of interest to me is a concept to which I was introduced at the Ditchley workshop, specifically, differential traceability. The ability to trace bad actors to bring them to justice seems to me an important goal in a civilized society."
You can't espouse that while also evangelizing encryption/privacy, Vint. That makes you an absolute fucking cowardly hypocrite.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
In plain English, Vint cerf wants an internet police.
Fuck that...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
For example, IP addresses are not always permanent and may change (for example, temporary IP addresses assigned at Wi-Fi hotspots) or may be ambiguous in the case of Network Address Translation. Information about the time of assignment and the party to whom an IP address was assigned may be needed to identify an individual user.
And not all machines are actually personal, family computers, internet cafes, library computers etc. are still a thing. While I'm not saying it's a good idea, if you want to record users well then you'd need to identify users, not machines. Oh and then I don't want the admins at work to be able to use my ID even though I need to access the Internet. And where would servers or IoT devices fit into this, like do I have to grant the light bulb permission to go online? And I imagine you'll run into all the fun credential passing issues with VPNs, SSH, VMs and so on. It kinda works for people who only have their own cell phone and their own laptop and nothing more complicated than that.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I rather like the idea of someone, something, being able to reach out and touch all those people who use the internet to commit felonies. I can't do it. One of the reasons I can't is because I have pretty well given up on the idea of being able to identify who is on the other end of this weeks scam. I can't even identify what country they are in.
I like the idea of a big brother who could reach out and smite on my behalf. Problem is, I can't think of anyone who I would trust with that power. How do I keep the RIAA away from my music ? How do I keep my state from checking that I haven't bought any straws lately, or the wrong laundry detergent?
The ancient romans expressed it as "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? " or (loosely translated) who will watch over the people who watch over you? I have no answer to this problem but do understand the desire to address it.
Good luck with this problem, Mr. Cerf, good luck.
"The ability to trace bad actors on the internet...Consider license plates on cars..."
This is a terrible analogy. Cars are physical objects that directly cause property damage, serious injury, or death. "The internet" is just speech, and not even the "yelling fire in a crowded theater" sort of speech.
Differential discovery implies that there is some benevolent authority somewhere. I'm wondering who Mr. Cerf believes could be trusted with this responsibility.
It's not surprising that this proposal comes out of a workshop in the UK; European governments have been trying desperately to deal with their revolting peasants who simply don't seem to want to comply with what Brussels and their own governments tell them to do. Both in the UK and in continental Europe, governments clearly want the ability to censor speech critical of government policies and to sow fear into the hearts of people critical of government policies.
What is charmingly naive about people like Cerf is that he thinks he can make this happen. The net effect of such a regulatory regime would simply be a shattering of the Internet, as people move to P2P platforms, encryption, and other tools to avoid government censorship of the kind he advocates. A good outcome would be that it would badly hurt platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
So, I say, bring it on, Vint, baby. Let's see whether the open source community can demonstrate what an authoritarian fool you are.
As it happens, we got lucky. It turns out you CAN have privacy, and still catch criminals.
It just so happens that felons tend to be stupid, and therefore fairly easily caught. Perhaps that's because generally, committing serious crimes is stupid, so typically stupid people do so. The rest of us can have our privacy, while the dumb crooks get themselves caught by being dumb.
It's ironic that many governments wanting this capability aren't even capable of identifying who crosses their borders and have millions of people living illegally in them. And, of course, in the US, many people throw a hissy fit when asked for identification on the street.
The ability to track, "differentially identify", and punish people for unwanted speech only works for law abiding citizens in the first place. And the net effect of putting more of such laws into place will be to breed more and more contempt for government and the rule of law.
Also, suppose there is a 95% chance that one will get away with X. Typically, the criminal, upen getting away with it the first time, does it again. They still don't get caught, so they do it again. Keep doing it until they get caught.
Certainly some people will commit a violation once and never again, but they account for a rather small proportion of crime, so I'm not all too concerned about them.
I'm afraid that a security extension that no one bothers to use cannot be counted is irrelevant to network planning. No network I've encountered since the invention of IPv6 has activated those extensions. Most of them who've bothered with IPv6 have run it in parallel with IPv4 on their externally exposed addresses. And _none_ have discarded their IPv4 exposed NAT addresses in favor of IPv6.
Whether NAT was "an awful solution", it has been effective and remains effective. I'm afraid that the underlying logical premise of IPv6, that every device should be addressable from every other device, was undesirable and flawed from its conception. Most devices on the Internet _should not_ be accessible from most other devices, and there has been no concrete reason to make them accessible. It's why most home routers simply use NAT, as do most corporate, educational, and public wifi networks. Though it is theoretically inelegant compared to IPv6, NAT on IPv4 takes less work to set up and is thus the standard worldwide.
Small companies get security contractors to operate their cameras, cameras that film people going into many small stores in the same area. The shops will know who you are when you enter, what your credit rating is, and whether you are suspected of anything, and none of that will be government information, and none of will require some massive db operated by big, bad FAANG, or the government. FAANG are just the first to set a pattern that smaller actors can use going forward. The benefit for most people will be decent customer service, and security more focused on bad actors. Companies will have more bang/$ on security spend, and could improve their sales. Everybody wins, which is why it will happen.
Those bleating about personal information are the 21st century version of throwing clogs. It will be too cheap, and too easy to not happen. Information wants to be free, and that includes what you look like, and where you spend your money. I'm not advocating this, it's just that the economic incentives tilt the tables that way whether we want it or not. So go ahead and call yourself rabiddog43
The companies will tag rabiddog43 as the one that drives a 2013 vw jetta diesel with license place x1z 251, his credit card number, and the name on it. The malls and shops will have footage of your car, your walk, your face if you ever visit any of them. The phone company will have all your movements throughout the day, based on cell tower telemetry. if they're google, they will have lower time resolution data from routine GPS pings. This is all information that they have as the normal course of doing their legitimate business.
You want the cell phone not to track your location? Your phone needs to talk to a nearby tower. Want 911 to work, in a car accident? what about traffic congestion data? GPS& tower data is helpful... Want people to accept your credit card? (cash will die soon, too expensive to deal with.) As soon as you attempt any commercial transaction, you are toast.
In the future, everyone you deal with knows *who you are* in the sense of having some summary of your digital history, if you are making any kind of commercial transaction, just like the small villages we lived in for tens of thousands of years. Honour and reputation will again become hugely important as it was of old, because the entire world will track how you behave. Everyone will behave well, or else.
Who needs big brother if there are a thousand little brothers? If ten or fifteen little brothers have *got it wrong* about something is that actually easier to fix than having one big brother? The real question we have is not whether we will be surveilled, it's how fragmented we want that surveillance to be, and who watches the watchers.
Laws need to evolve to deal with pervasive personal information, where it is everywhere, held by companies large and small, and understand that personal information is helpful to governments in providing services, not just policing. It's a conversation we aren't having yet, with all the privacy commissioners and luddites trying to shove the genie back into the bottle. Valiant effort. won't work.
IPv6 with RAD includes privacy extensions by default and dead easy to deploy (even easier than DHCP on a home router.) While with typical IPv4 nat, someone who wants to map your home network just has to find your subnet, then has 255 or fewer addresses to ping. In contrast, using bog standard IPv6 (the privacy extensions became standard fifteen odd years ago?), you need to search 2 billion internets worth of addresses to map each home network, which will, at least, take much longer, but really, it is practically infeasible.
The addresses used by IPv6 privacy extensions rotate more rapidly than IPv4 DHCP4, because they run multiple addresses at once. To argue that IPv4 is more privacy oriented than IPv6 is idiocy. Don't be an idiot.
This idea was a part of Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End". In it the government had the ability to trace and control all internet traffic, i believe by mandating that all routers have technology enabling that.
Ostensibly the government needed this ability to track terrorists. And the most fantastical part of the book IMHO was that the government did in fact only use it to track terrorists.
In a fantasy land where we could actually trust the government to impartially use such power only in a responsible way i'd be 100% behind this idea. Unfortunately, we happen to live in the real world.
We may end up in that situation anyways, but if we do i expect it won't solve as many problems as we'd like and we'll have to deal with a bunch of new abuses by the government itself. (And it's not like the government does a great job of using the tools currently available to solve problems on the internet as things are now anyways.)
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