Subject: Re: Bruce Schneier's Proposal to dedicate November meeting to saving the Internet from the NSA

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2013 23:15:07 -0400 (EDT)

> From: Dean Willis <[email-masked]>

    > The [IETF] .. needs dedicate its next meeting to this task. This is
    > an emergency, and demands an emergency response.

The thing is that I'm not sure how much of this is the NSA 'breaking'
protocols/algorithms, and how much is finding ways past/around that security.
E.g. some of it (from accounts in the news) is definitely back doors,
inserted into hardware or software, and clearly we can't fix those.

Most importantly, in one news story I read, Snowden was quoted as saying
"Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can
frequently find ways around it".

If this is accurate, we can fix protocols till the cows come home, and people
who wish to gain access to the data will just break into the hosts, and grab
the data before/after it crosses the network. So it's not at all clear than
the IETF can really fix (much of) the problem.

	Noel

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From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 10:01:10 -0400 (EDT)

> From: Martin Millnert <[email-masked]>

    > Bruce was ... suggesting that encrypting everything on the wire makes
    > both metadata and payload collection from wires less valuable. Here
    > comes the key point: Encrypting everything on the wire raises the cost
    > for untargeted mass surveillance significantly. And that is what it is
    > all about.

I have no problems with encrypting everything, as long as we realize that in
doing so, we're only solving one corner of the problem, and the watchers will
just move their efforts elsewhere; all intelligent attackers always look for
the weak point, no?

(Although I have to wonder at the computing load needed to do so. I gather
e.g. Google's datacenters use enormous amounts of energy - I wonder if mass
encryption of all traffic on the Internet would be literally a 'boiling the
ocean' solution... I'm amused by the memory of people who used to react with
shock and horror to variable length addresses, because of the extra
computational load required to handle _them_....)

    > And best is of course if this can be end to end

That's going to take quite a while to accomplish; it requires updating all the
hosts. (I know, we don't have to get to 99.9%, but it's still non-trivial to
get to, say, 70%.)

	Noel

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From: Adam Novak <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 10:29:48 -0700

You're right that a flat mesh is not the best topology for
long-distance communication, especially with current routing
protocols, which require things like global lists of all routeable
prefixes.

On the protocol front, I suggest that the IETF develop routing
protocols that can work well in a flat mesh topology. Parallelizing
traffic streams over many available routes, so it all doesn't try to
take the shortest path, would appear to be a particularly important
feature, as would preventing all of a node's links from being swamped
by through traffic that other nodes want it to route.

The problem with long-distance traffic over flat mesh networks is less
with throughput (if everything isn't taking the shortest path) than
with the latencies involved in sending traffic over a very large
number of hops. I think the solution there is to send traffic that's
leaving your local area over the existing (tapable) long-distance
infrastructure. The idea is to make tapping expensive, not impossible.

There's also the point to be made that current traffic patterns depend
to a significant extent on current Internet architectural decisions.
If everyone had a gigabit connection to their neighbors, but only a 10
megabit uplink to route long-distance traffic over, they might find a
use for all that extra local bandwidth.

On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 7:22 AM, Noel Chiappa <[email-masked]> wrote:
>     > One way to frustrate this sort of dragnet surveillance would be to
>     > reduce centralization in the Internet's architecture.
>     > ...
>     > [If] The IETF focused on developing protocols (and reserving the
>     > necessary network numbers) to facilitate direct network peering between
>     > private individuals, it could make it much more expensive to mount
>     > large-scale traffic interception attacks.
>
> I'm not sure this is viable (although it's an interesting concept).
>
> With our current routing tools, switching to a flat mesh, as opposed to the
> current fairly-structured system, would require enormous amounts of
> configuration/etc work on the part of smaller entities.
>
> Also, traffic patterns being what they are (e.g. most of my traffic goes
> quite a distance, and hardly any to things close by), everyone would wind up
> handling a lot of 'through' traffic - orders of magnitude more than their
> current traffic load.
>
>         Noel

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From: "George, Wes" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 17:02:42 -0400

+Bruce Schneier (at least the email address published in his latest I-D), since he should be at least aware of the discussion his callout has generated.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
> Ted Lemon
>
> On Sep 5, 2013, at 8:46 PM, Lucy Lynch <[email-masked]> wrote:
> >> I'd like to share the challenge raised by Bruce Schneier in:
>
> I thought it was a great call to action.   Is Bruce coming to Vancouver?

[WEG] Sounds to me like he just volunteered to be the keynote for the Tech Plenary.

Wes George

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From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 14:12:36 -0700

Hi Dean,
At 11:31 06-09-2013, Dean Willis wrote:
>What if they didn't say they were NSA guys, but just discretely 
>worked a weakness into a protocol? What if they were a trusted 
>senior member of the community?

Trust does not work well without accountability.  There is less to 
worry about if you do not implicitly trust senior members of the community.

Regards,
-sm