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IETF and wiretapping standards
Anonymous Coward writes "I just noticed that the IETF has sent out a request for discussion dealing with the implementation of wiretapping in Internet Protocols. The motivation is based on laws some Governments have about telecommunication systems." The message and subscription information to their discussion email list, punningly titled "Raven", are available on the web. Oh, and "some Governments" includes the U.S. and most other countries, so I hope the IETF will get some good feedback.
All encryption is *not* breakable (meaning not all of it is, not that none of it is). It's all circumventable, sure, but that's not the same thing. Please don't spread this bogus idea any further.
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Xenu loves you!
What does this have to do with my legal vs. illegal argument? Collecting information in this fashion is perfectly legal and I totally agree that this happens all the time. When a company installs sniffing equipment on data and voice communications lines as suggested, it becomes quite illegal and I can't imagine a company doing this. It seems like a hell of a lot of risk (major fines and prison terms) for such a trivial gain (some marketing information).
When you fill out one of those forms to enter to win a free car, the fine print tells us that they're planning on collecting and using that information for marketing. In fact, unless the fine print explicitely states otherwise, you can usually assume that the company you're giving your information to will or reserves the right to use your information for marketing reasons. Again, this is perfectly legal.
I understand and agree with that, but that has nothing to do with my post.
Please elaborate.
The IETF is not yet another evil corporation here. They're an open INTERNATIONAL community devoted to keeping the Internet's infrastructure running smoothly and evolving.
That's their purpose.
You can bet that the members and coordinators are pretty intelligent folk. They're not going to adopt things unless they've given it a lot of thought.
Let's PLEASE not get worked up over any of this when the IETF is just starting its discussion. These people are not stupid people. Let's try and give them the benefit of the doubt that they are working in the Internet's best interests.
I believe that, technically, since the data passes through the US, the US has the ability ("right"?) to monitor in some fashion. I'm not sure if there are legal issues here, but you can bet that other countries are doing precisely the same thing.
The difference is that information like this is collected legally.
Always read the fine print.
It would be illegal for a company to collect this type of information via any sort of Internet wiretap "backdoors". I imagine it'd be illegal to even attempt to use these backdoors at all, in fact (and detectable, to an extent). Before you pipe up and tell me that there are companies that break the law every day, I'd like you to name one that regularly performs the equivalent of wiretaps on normal people with the intent to hurt them or make a profit from the information they gleam.
Things like this only happen in conspiracy theories and the occasionally B-rated movie.
I think we are quite some way from BigBrother, but I hope people realize that the current government also is far from trustworthy.
If you believe you cannot in good faith trust the government that governs you, that your government is consistently acting against your wishes and the wishes of your community, out of malice or otherwise, it's high time you overthrew that government.
More likely, your mistrust might be easily corrected. There are several reasons a person might not trust his government. A) The government might be making decisions based on information the citizen does not understand or have at his disposal; B) The government might not be making decisions with as much information as they need, causing it to make poor decisions; C) A small number of people may have gotten a lot of bad publicity and have been ousted in the past for abusing their positions in government; D) The government might be hell-bent on ruining the lives of the citizens it's elected to govern.
I'm tempted to say A and B are the dominant factors here. (Perhaps a bit of C as well, but that can't be helped.)
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader on how they might take a more active role in their government to resolve these deficiencies.
(a) The two algorithms I suggested - Skipjack and Rijndael - are considered about the strongest algorithms out there by the crypto specialists, from what few papers I have read. Those, and Serpent (another VERY nice algorithm) won't be breakable in any practical way for the next 50 years, minimum.
Skipjack is former DoD, I believe, and recently declassified. Rijndael and Serpent are competing as replacements for DES, and are through to round 2 of evaluation. So far, they are the hot favourites, for being both strong and fast to apply.
(b) If the crypto experts know what to crack, they have advantages over not knowing what they're cracking. Those advantages are that any potential weaknesses in the algorithm are known in advance, and knowing how to apply the generated key to the encrypted message. Remember, these are AUTOMATED systems, not manual ones. That means that either ALL known algorithms are applied, OR the message is parsed and the most probable algorithm is used. Either way, if you trick the system into applying the wrong algorithm, it won't detect that unless a human agent intervenes. BUT, if you're clever and ensure that the message decodes into something seemingly valid, when an incorrect algorithm of your choice is applied, the system won't alert a human agent that something is wrong. It'll think the message is cracked, and move onto the next one.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Skipjack has, likewise, been analysed, since the DoD declassified it. I believe it's considered as strong as Serpent, though it's unpopular because of it's origins.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Same way I did. Use a search engine, and download it from one of the International crypto archives. I also found an excellent postscript document on how it works, too. If I can remember the archive I fetched it from, before this falls off today's listings, I'll follow up with the address.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
(This would only be usable IF the compression reduced the transmission time by AT LEAST as much as you were adding spacing to make it inaudible.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Depends. Microsoft might adopt, embrace and extend it, thus breaking all the world's Government's espionage systems. Hmmmm. That's a thought!!! Hey, Mr Gates! Can I have a quick word with you...? There's this feature I'd like you to add....
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
For the curious who don't want to follow the line, that's RFC 2401.
as to what it talks about, you'll just have to have a look, 'cause I'm not telling :)
I've not seen any credible claims that any of the NIST candidates are believed to be more secure than triple-DES.
If everyone would bother playing with simple, widely available tools like traceroute, everyone would discover that in reality, traffic between two given hosts tends to traverse the exact same route for long periods of time (typically at least hours or days).
This may seem like nitpicking, but it's actually a very important distinction, because forgetting it leads people down the path where they believe that the government is in the position to grant certain rights to the people, and nothing could be further from the truth.
The people have rights, and the most that the government is supposed to have power to do is to place certain minimal limits on those rights.
One of the major reasons the Bill of Rights was controversial was not because anyone thought that the ideas therein were bad, but because they were afraid that if they enumerated certain rights of the people, that the people (and government) would start to believe that the people had only those rights, and that they were somehow granted by the government. In order to placate those concerns, the Tenth Amendment was added, but unfortunately despite that people (and government) have in fact fallen into exactly that trap.
Here's a brief article I recently wrote about this subject.
One of the first things I learned when I set out to learn about crypto was that you should always assume the enemy knows the algorithm you're using. It basically boils down to a strong algorithm will remain strong, even when the attacker has knowledge of what's being used, while a weak one won't matter anyway.
There are programs that will help to mask PGP messages by stripping off the standard headers on the encrypted messages (which generally means you need to know who sent the message, and to which key). This helps to slow down attackers, but it's not going to keep a determined attacker from figuring out what you're using.
The point where stripping off headers will really help is if you're trying to hide the encrypted stream in another data stream (steganography). But I'm not sure how practical it would be to use stego for a real-time phone conversation between 2 or more people.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Ok what will IETF consider as their "particpation"
on wiretapping?
A technical protocol? Then sorry. Russia saw this with proposal SORM-1. A very good document in their technical aspects but completely outdated. The proposed technology was nearly 5-year old and no one was agreeing to follow it. And the discussion that followed made the FSB to drop any ideas to make it reality. They didn't publish why
but we can infer from proposal SORM-2:
Technologies change. To force a specific wiretapping protocol may "kill" the technological advance.
You have a technical wiretapping protocol that everyone knows about. So will just the government use it? And how to secure it? And if someone really breaks in? Can we manage to measure the damage?
Can we wiretap telephones? Yes. Can we wiretap IP? Sure. Can we wiretap WWW? Of course. Can you wiretap everything? ARE YOU MAD???
Today wiretapping 100 seems easy. Tomorrow we may face the fact that every home has its TV set and its Internet connection. And whatever concern we may face in relation to security we can't follow everybody. Even 1 person is enough for weeks of work. Specially if he is some kind of geek or hacker.
Well these were some of the arguments I saw in discussions. I deliberately avoided to state here any moral and imoral parts of the discussion. However I can say that a broad part of the people agreed to allow FSB to follow criminals on the Net.
The result was SORM-2. I can't say it was perfect. Maybe far from it. But it possessed a principal difference. It didn't carry anymore things about technical protocols and obligations. It was mostly a "List of principles" regulating the behaviour of FSB and ISPs in situations where wiretapping was required. One important point was that FSB was required to get a court order to proceed any wiretapping on Internet. Besides any technical aspect should be regulated in common by the ISP and FSB in mostly a case-to-case basis.
Sincerly I think that soon or later the lawmakers will realize that they should go this way. But then, I think it's not IETF problem to consider about wiretapping.
Apart from this. A teological aspect. Somehow, States are trying to know everything. However every theology teaches us that only God knows everything. So it seems that, anyway, these attempts are doomed. Or will they try to wiretap God?
I never understood the concerns over "Internet wiretapping". Every packet you send over the Internet goes through an unpredictable path to its destination. And everyone knows this. That's why everything that's critical should be encrypted.
So why is government "wiretapping" (call it what it is: packet sniffing) such a big deal? Twelve year old script kiddies already do this all the time.
So what should be done? I don't have the breadth of knowledge to give an authoritative or complete reply, but my inclination would be to maximise security (and hence privacy) and leave the wiretapping considerations to individual governments and ISPs.
Here's why...
If I were planning an illegal activity over the internet, you can be damn sure I'd use 1024 bit pgp encryption. It wouldn't matter a damn what wiretapping facilities were in place if all they could read was encrypted crap. They'd only be able to read the mail of the innocent and the naive.
If the government can get in, so can other people. Back doors are by their very nature insecure.
The government is not a company. By saying "and all other" you are implying that they are equivalent. This is nonsense. The government has sole monopoly over the creation and enforcement of laws and the imposition and collection of taxes. If there are any companies that have these priviledges, then they do so because a government have them to them.
And companies won't leave the internet alone because most of the internet is theirs! There may be a few charitable nodes out there, but 95% of the internet is owned by a commercial entity or funded through government taxes. Saying you want companies to leave the internet alone is like saying you want commercial publishers to leave the newspapers alone.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
(this is an example of very bad moderating btw...)
No. It is an example of someone having an opinion that you do not agree with. There is a difference.
Moderation does not exist to ensure that only people who agree with you get read. It exists to promote interesting and insightful posts while filtering flamebait, offtopic, and other pointless posts.
In short: Freedom of speech. Not correctness of speech.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
For example, imagine a router which would only tee traffic to another port if presented with a electronic signed by a judge and specifically naming the port(s) to be watched. Obviously this would imply a proper PKI for the judiciary, but hey, if they want our co-operation they'd better put their own house in order first.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
1. It makes discrimination very easy. This would be an issue in case of war for instance (think about what happened to the Jews).
2. We just don't trust the authorities, do we!?
It seems like people are afraid the FBI, CIA, Police, NSA and others will use the wiretapping against honest people; and not just to get the bad people.
I think we are quite some way from BigBrother, but I hope people realize that the current government also is far from trustworthy.
Both problems are not easily solved. --include standard quote here about this being beyond the scope of this simple email-- What we might think about right now is the needless overhead this is going to present to routers, firewalls etc. :)
I don't think the government is going to compensate with financial support for increasing bandwidth
Looking on the bright side: Hackers can have a load of fun exploiting it during the first few years, and sensitive data can still be encrypted. ;)
... its called "security by obscurity". Its highly regarded in the security world as a valuable way to, well, screw yourself over.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Either you trust the crypto or you don't. If you don't: don't use it. If you do, then use it, and while you at it send your worst enemy the source code to the program, a book about the crypto as a taunt, and some recommendations on good hardware. And then have fun when he realizes you chose "won't" rather "chances are".
(this is an example of very bad moderating btw...)
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I am well aware of the EITFs role, and that they have no actual authorative power. That is my point, don't dare to compromise on this issues: if we can't get standards that are not designed from the ground up for the purpose of infringing on our basic rights, then let the EITF make whatever standards they want and screw using them.
If it reaches the point that there is no other option but to develop some sort of "standards" for this crap, then those standards should be disregarded.
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No, you have got this backwards. The fear is not that that America will water down other countries regulations, but the opposite. America has some of the strictest laws in democratic when it comes to mandatory government holes in Telecom equipment.
You have been brainwashed for too long...
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/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
f the IETF decides that it will implement some way of "digital wiretapping" with whatever existing/new standards, I highly urge every to tell the IETF to FUCK OFF.
If the IETF is such a spineless, worthless, puppet of an organization that it gives into these demands by the American government (and don't fool yourself, we all know who is really making these demands), then I think the Internet is a hell of a lot better off without it: standards or no.
Screw "OPTIONAL", these are human rights issues, not things to compromise on. Shame on the IETF for opening up for it, shame on you for suggesting it, and shame on Slashdot for putting this at the top of this discussion. For once I am not proud to be a
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Set standards for the best technical reasons. Explain to governments why they shouldn't block adoption of those standards. Wave "bye-bye" in your rear-view mirror to those nations who choose to block them, as the rest of the world speeds off into the future.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Why is it that governments and all forget the fundamental problem with encryption? No matter how good the cypher, how good the encryption, whether it be Enigma, DES, or even a OTP..... It is breakable.
All encryption is breakable, it MUST be in cleartext before its being sent and it MUST be in cleartext when its read. Encryption won't help if they have a bug in the keyboard, they have compromised the machine, or if they have a bug on the display device.
Of course, thats inconvienent, perhaps a little dangerous. Its not easy to put dozens of bugs all over the place like that, to monitor many people. It requires effort, money, work..
So here's the interesting question. *Why* do they want it to be so easy, so cheap, so convienent to monitor tens, thousands, or millions of encrypted communications all at the same time? Why is the old-fashioned bug so bad? Why do they want the extreme convienence of monitoring the nation? Why do they want to build an infrastructure that makes it possible to monitor the entire nation's communication network?
Please, enlighten me..
I believe the year was 1899 when the Indiana tried to declare pi as being equal to 4, not 3 or 3.24. (Apparently somewhere in the soup of numbers that is pi, there are several consecutive nines, and the good folks in Indiana figured theyd just round up...)
However, let me clearly state that I am in no way in favor of this kind of violation of privacies. I'm saying that if things come to the point that there is no other option but to develop some sort of "standards" for this crap, there should be at least an attempt to prevent them from being REQUIRED.
I guess I've just learned better than to expect that the world is all going to be sunshine and light. Governments don't care about their citizens anymore, and corporations don't care about their customers. Power and money are what talk. It's unlikely that a group of essentially volunteers are going to make significant headway against world governments and multinational corporations in basic human rights issues.
If you expect the rest of the world to play fair, may I politely inform you that you have some growing up to do. "Death before dishonor!" sounds nice on a tombstone, but in reality, discretion is often the better part of valor. If you can't stand up to them directly, maybe the next best step is to do what you can and live to fight another day.
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
I'm a white southerner and I am offended that you use use the term "southerners" to refer to inhabitants of the southern United States of America.
jsm
Given the nature of routing, particularly on the internet, how would it be determined who would have jurisdiction to perform said "wiretapping" of the VOIP call in question? The call between a guy in Paris and his buddy in Tokyo may very well pass through the US - would the US then be allowed to tap the call? If not, what would stop them? Given a back door into VOIP, I could easily sniff, and hence, listen to / decode other people's calls. The Governments of the world may argue that this power would only be used for legitimate means, and through legally established channels. Don't believe them. All powers given to a Government will eventually be abused. The harder it is to get caught, the more frequent abuse will be. Humans are by nature curious, and Governments are by nature distrustful.
Democracy is dead. All kneel to the Commander In Thief.
The mailing list is public. You can subscribe here and read the archives here. This, IMHO, is good. The existing posts on the list are, for the most part, high quality, constructive and thoughtful. One would hope that this being posted to Slashdot doesn't change that.
The second reason it's uneconomical is because it's alot easier to place a hardware bug into current systems (plug in a system board, replace the network card with a lookalike and a transmitter, tempest, etc) than to tap the upstream site(s) they will be using.
The third and final reason it's uneconomical is because this all assumes the would-be criminal isn't using encryption - and if he's savvy he likely is. So what's the point? They wouldn't be able to spy on the criminals anyway - just the average american who thinks IE and outlook express are the greatest programs ever.
Soooo... my take on it? The feds want to monitor domestic communications, because anything else is impractical - too expensive even for the Big Three.
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then they should do it themselves, instead of mandating that everyone make it "easy" for them. Especially here in the United States of Amerika, nothing says I need to make it easy for anyone to understand what I'm saying.
Not to mention that people who really want to have private conversations still will be able to, by piggybacking on top of (or tunneling with) "truly" secure protocols. There are internet phone apps that use PGP, will probably ones that use GPG, there are secure ytalk's floating around, etc.
The hell with government observation. It's their problem if they can't read my mail, or tap my phone, not mine, nor my ISP's.
The IETF, bowing down to opening up holes in secure protocols, will IMHO, completely invalidate any stance they have about any commitment to security. After all, would you buy a safe which is secure, "except for this spot right here, which will only be cut through by Authorized Personnel [or anyone else who tries]"?
Compromising security for the sole purpose of being friendly to government is ridiculous. Do you think they'd reciprocate on their own security so that we can tap into their communications? Of course not. But then, who ever said life was fair?
Even compromising security so that something will be accepted for use in multiple countries doesn't work. What self-respecting nation would want to use something that has backdoors the US (or any other) government can use to eavesdrop on its citizenry? Even when told, "We won't do it unless we have to. We mean it this time. You can trust us. Would we lie? Again?" I seriously doubt anyone with even a modicum of concern would believe that, or use a backdoored protocol.
Just look at the Clipper chip, the export version of Lotus Notes, etc. How many do you see in widespread deployment?
My personal feelings are echoed by the statement (Jefferson?) that people who choose to give up some freedom for security deserve neither. And yes, I would rather see a criminal get away with a crime to avoid sacrificing any innocent's privacy, since only dumb criminals would use dumb protocols to begin with.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
We are non-profit, grass-roots, and in the crucial early stages of development.
Our goal is to develop a publically available VPN based on IPv6 and IPSec. We hope to be a public domain for serving 21st Cent. things likes VoIP, application servers, anonymizing proxies. We also seek to make cheap computers and free (speech) software available to low income families and individuals.
I invite you to see www.ompages.com. If privacy is an issue for you and you want to do more than 'write your local congressman', for example, by donating skills, equipment and resources to the public works project to build a secure network then join us. There is no leader, you can start your own project on ompages that furthers our goals of private networks and global technology proliferation. There will be no public network where individual privacy rights are the prime goal unless intelligent and experienced sys admins, programmers and web-masters get on the ball and make it happen. Talk is cheap; we can do this.
We must speak with one international voice against privacy intrusions to the IETF. If the IETF won't give us the privacy protections that are our birth rights, then we must implement our own. In fact, AOL users should not be subjected to the hoodwinking they are receiving. It is our duty as technically educated net citizens to give them the services they have now in a much more secure environment. Our priority is not the bottom-line; it's the line that must be maintained between individuality and government sponsored controls. This is no small task, but then again, neither is freedom. The U.S. claims to be governed by the people; ompages.com is.
My though is that putting wiretap capabilities into the lowest levels of the protocols is useless. So you can tap the IPv6 packet layer. So what? I'll just use SSL above that, or PGP-encrypt my mail, and your tap is useless.
There's also this: countries feel they need the Internet. Perhaps it's time to use the leverage this gives. Make no allowances in the protocols for wiretapping and the like, and give various countries a choice: allow people their privacy, or you will not be able to interoperate with the Internet. As noted above there are too many ways the people the governments could legitimately tap can bypass any hooks in the protocols, and why should the Internet protocols be designed to even potentially compromise the privacy of those who aren't legitimate targets?
That way, if a company wants to implement and sell a product that meets the standard in a way that fascistic governments who don't believe in personal freedoms will let them build and sell them, they can do so by implementing the "OPTIONAL" Backdoor parts of the spec.
Those groups who prefer security over letting Uncle Sam (or whichever hacker group out there is simply smart enough to read the specs and implement their own snooping software that follows the "RFC-'1984' - Government Backdoors into Network Protocols" spec) from eavesdropping, like the OpenBSD guys, can simply ignore the "OPTIONAL" part of the spec that outlines the backdoor without breaking the entire thing.
Sorry for the emotionally-loaded phrasing, but this kind of crap really gets me steamed. I'm amazed on a daily basis at how willing our governments are (especially here in the US) to simply trample our civil/constitutional rights for the Holy purpose of "National Security" whatever that means.
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!