Re: IAB statement on draft-farrell-perpass-attack-00

[SM <[e-mail]>]

At 08:13 27-11-2013, IAB Chair wrote:
>At the Vancouver IETF meeting, the IAB held a technical plenary that 
>discussed pervasive monitoring.  The IAB believes that pervasive 
>monitoring represents an attack on the

The minutes for that plenary is not available at the moment.  I would 
appreciate if the minutes could be published.

>  Internet in as much as large amounts of information that is 
> intended to be confidential between sets of individuals is in fact 
> gathered and aggregated by third parties.  Such a broad scale 
> attack can undermine confidence in the infrastructure, no matter 
> the intent of those collecting the information.
>
>draft-farrell-perpass-attack-00 is intended to establish an IETF 
>community consensus on this matter.  We encourage the community to 
>read and engage in discussion about this draft, and also to take 
>practical measures to limit pervasive monitoring within their environments.

In Section 1:

   "that should be mitigated where possible via the design of protocols
    that make pervasive monitoring significantly more expensive or
    infeasible"

That sounds like an arms race [1].

   "A fuller problem statement with more examples and description can be
   found in [ProblemStatement]"

That document is not available.

   "In particular, the term, when used technically, implies nothing about
    the motivation of the bad-actor mounting the attack, who is still
    called a bad-actor no matter what one really thinks about their
    motivation."

The usual term in the IETF is "adversary" and not "bad-actor".  "bad 
actor" is sometimes defined as "contentious individual".

The Security Considerations section that the intended BCP is all 
about privacy.  The Introduction section mentions "illegal purposes 
by criminals".  I would describe the problem as having different 
angles; bad people could capture the information being exchanged and 
use it for nefarious purposes, nation states [2] can capture the 
information and use it to find out what the people are discussing.

The draft is well-written.  Given the catchy title I am left to 
wonder which parts of the document is polite fiction (a social 
scenario in which all participants are aware of a truth, but pretend 
to believe in some alternative version of events to avoid conflict or 
embarrassment).  In very simplistic terms the draft says:

   "consensus to design protocols so as to mitigate the attack, where
    possible."

Quoting  Martin Thomson: we trusted you; we were naive; never again.

Regards,
-sm

1. the continuing competitive attempt by two or more nations each to 
have available to it more and more powerful weapons than the other(s).

2. 
http://ir.elbitsystems.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=61849&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1810121&highlight=