Re: [Int-area] Where/How is the features innovation, happening? Re: 202201111037.AYC

["Abraham Y. Chen" <[e-mail]>]

Hi, YiHao:

0)    It appears to me that you are still applying your own technical 
considerations around the subject. Doing so will perpetuate the current 
stalemate. What I suggested was to step back a bit, in order to 
visualize an overall picture of the logic and interactions among the 
parties involved.

1)    " ...  I would say the current countermeasures are designed for 
anyone except the LE because LE can force any part to disclose specific 
data ... ":    Then, make this an explicit statement as the design 
criterion for the privacy measures, so that the LEs will not have the 
excuses to do mass surveillance. Bragging there is no back-door, or even 
refusing to support LE when requested, such as Apple's position on a 
criminal case sometime ago as I heard, LEs will get it done anyway by 
looking for "volunteers" from third-party encryption crackers when their 
internal resources could not. Then, the solution to the secret is out in 
the hacker community.

2)    I learned a long time ago that a sophisticated lock is out there 
for challenging a hacker to figure out a way to break into it. Way back 
when, a chemist told me that even Epoxies had solvents. So, we should 
not stretch our energy to cover too much aspects that some tend to be 
counterproductive for the society as a whole, in the long run.

Regards,


Abe (2022-01-11 11:22)



On 2022-01-07 02:29, Jiayihao wrote:
>
> Hello Abe,
>
> Happy new year!
>
> The postal system analogy is a good story to understand IP, but not 
> equal to the pessimistic conclusion you made. For the conclusion part, 
> I am fully agree with Tom’s arguments.
>
> As you focus on IP(v4/v6) specifically, we more or less follow the 
> logic of How TCP/IP works. Within TCP/IP, privacy can be divided into 
> content encryption (A) and content delivery (B). A and B both belong 
> to user privacy. However, A and B are different things.
>
> For A, Tom’s arguments is good enough. As for B, same as Tom’s but one 
> more thing to point. Since you care more about the LE, I would say the 
> current countermeasures are designed for anyone except the LE because 
> LE can force any part to disclose specific data that should be 
> uncovered under its design philosophy.
>
> In short, in IP ecosystem, both A and B is still worth doing. However, 
> as I mentioned in my last mail, any design philosophy/architecture has 
> somehow implicit **trust party**. But a LE could be All-powerful 
> because the fundament of **trust party** is break and no **trust 
> party** anymore if you put LE into consideration.
>
> As you mentioned in your last email that there are conflicts 
> requirements, it happens all the time. RFC 8890 give the answer and 
> the direction IETF choose.
>
> So back to the questions I am wondering: If we can upgrade the 
> architecture somehow, can we enhance the privacy by ways that more 
> than current countermeasures like RFC7721 can do?
>
> Have an excellent 2022!
>
> Best,
>
> Yihao
>
> *From:* Abraham Y. Chen <[e-mail]>
> *Sent:* 2022年1月1日 0:58
> *To:* Tom Herbert <[e-mail]>
> *Cc:* Jiayihao <[e-mail]>; [e-mail]
> *Subject:* Re: [Int-area] Where/How is the features innovation, 
> happening? Re: 202112301817.AYC
> *Importance:* High
>
> Hi, Tom:
>
> 1) "Your argument seems to be that we shouldn't bother with things 
> like security or encryption at all :-) ...    ": My apologies for 
> getting you to an unexpected conclusion. Perhaps I failed to make an 
> explicit statement because I thought that I was following a thread 
> about the IPv4 or IPv6 addresses "scrambling" schemes for protecting 
> the privacy of or increasing the security to users. That is, we should 
> look at this subject by the "Divide & Conquer" concept. In other 
> words, I was saying that encrypting the "Content" part as much as the 
> sender / receiver pair agrees to. But, keep the "Address" part mostly 
> clear. This way, the LE parties will not have the excuse of performing 
> "mass surveillance" by scooping up everything, then take time to 
> digest and regurgitate the "Content" for hidden treasures. (Remember 
> the report that the German Chancellor's telephone calls were picked up 
> by spy agencies?) Rumors have been, that high performance computer and 
> large capacity storage device manufacturers are having a field day 
> supplying equipment to LE organizations such as NSA because the 
> current Internet trend.
>
> 2) Since my engineering training started from RF (Radio Frequency or 
> Wireless -- actually all bands from audio all the way to 60+ GHz), 
> then telephony, and cellular phone before getting involved with the 
> Internet, allow me to briefly describe my understanding of the 
> characteristics of each with respect to our current discussion. 
> Hopefully, the below can thread different fields together to clarify 
> my point:
>
>     A. In the RF field, any signal that is transmitted (sent) into the 
> "ether" is a fair game for everyone. So, there is no "Address" in the 
> basic RF signal transmission. Most RF equipment does not transmit its 
> identification by itself unless the user does so as part of the 
> "Content" on purpose. For example, a commercial (AM, FM, TV) station 
> announces its station ID, or call-sign (Address) as part of the 
> broadcast (Content) according to FCC Rules. So, in RF communication, 
> we concentrate only on encrypting the "Content" (such as scrambled / 
> encode speech) for proprietary applications.
>
>     B. For traditional land-line telephony services, the caller's 
> phone number (Address) is fixed by wiring (nailed up) upon 
> subscription. Only the called party's phone number (Addressee) is 
> dialed once to tell the switching system who is the destination party, 
> so that the switches can make the connection. Once the called party 
> answers, the actual session consists of only "Content" exchanges, no 
> more "Address" information necessary. Speech scramblers may be used on 
> either end as a pair, for private conversation (Content).
>
>     C. RF signals from cellular mobile phone do carry the handset (and 
> the cell tower) identifications (Addresses) on both ends without the 
> user's knowledge to facilitate establishing and maintaining a 
> connection, while the user constantly crosses the boundaries between 
> cells. Similarly, speech scramblers may be used on either end as a 
> pair for private conversation (Content). Note that since VoIP is 
> behind the scene these days, cellular mobile service is supported by a 
> mixture of both the traditional telephony and the Internet 
> infrastructures.
>
>     D. If we look at the Internet environment itself, it is kind like 
> the cellular mobile phone service. It is inherently wide open like RF 
> because packets are forwarded by unstructured mesh routers allowing 
> everyone to listen in. Yet, each IP packet header carries the 
> Addresses of both ends for directing routers to deliver the packet, as 
> well as for the return packet. So, how much can a sender "hide" the 
> identities of either or both ends for privacy while still enables the 
> routers to deliver the packet to its intended destination effectively 
> is a real challenge. Whatever the scheme chosen, it can not be too 
> sophisticated to over-burden the routers which means that it is 
> probably mot much a challenge for a perpetrator intentionally trying 
> to crack the scheme.
>
> 3)    My sense from the above analysis is that attempting to make the 
> "Address" part of an IP packet "cryptic" for improving the privacy / 
> security properties of the "Content" is probably futile. The more we 
> attempt doing it, the stronger the LEs' argument for mass 
> surveillance, even though they probably already knew the solution.
>
> 4)    On the other hand, if we push too hard on strengthening the 
> encryption of the "Content" without a back door, we essentially are 
> helping the perpetrators. This is because if this part worked, the LEs 
> will not be able to monitor and catch the criminals!
>
> 5)    So, we need to review the pros and cons of the end results, 
> before jumping into a scheme.
>
> Happy New Year!
>
> Abe (2021-12-31 11:57 EST)
>
> On 2021-12-30 13:29, Tom Herbert wrote:
>
>     On Mon, Dec 27, 2021 at 7:00 PM Abraham Y. Chen
>     <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>         Hi, YiHao:
>
>         0) Hope you had a Merry Christmas as well!
>
>         1) Re: Ur. Pts 1) & 2):    Allow me to modify and expand your
>         definitions of the abbreviations, ICP & ISP, a bit to
>         streamline our discussion, then focusing on related meanings
>         of the two keyword prefixes, "C" and "A" in the middle of them:
>
>         A.    ICP (Internet Content Provider):    This is the same as
>         you are using.
>
>         B.    IAP (Internet Access Provider):    This will represent
>         the ISP that you are referring to.
>
>         C.    ISP (Internet Service Provider):    This will be used as
>         the general expression that covers both ICP and IAP above.
>
>         With these, I agree in general with your analysis.
>
>         2) From the above, there is a simpler (layman's instead of
>         engineer's) way to look at this riddle. Let's consider the old
>         fashioned postal service. A letter itself is the "Content".
>         The envelop has the "Address". The postal service cares only
>         what is on the envelop. In fact, it is commonly practiced
>         without explicitly identified that one letter may have
>         multiple layers of envelops that each is opened by the
>         "Addressee" who then forward the next "Addressee" according to
>         the "Address" on the inside envelop, accordingly. To a larger
>         scale, postal services put envelops destined to the same city
>         in one bag. Then, bags destined to the same country in one
>         container, etc. This process is refined to multiple levels
>         depending on the volume of the mail and the facility (routes)
>         available for delivery. Then, the containers are opened
>         progressively along the destination route. No wonder that the
>         US Postal Service claimed (during the early days of the
>         Internet) that the mail system was the fist "packet switching"
>         system.
>
>         3) So, in this analogy, the "Address" on each and every
>         envelop has to be in the clear (not coded or encrypted in any
>         sense) for the mail handlers to work with. It is only the most
>         inner "Content", the letter itself, can have Confidential
>         information (or encrypted if the sender wishes). Under this
>         scenario, the LE (Law Enforcement) is allowed only to track
>         suspected mail by the "Addresses". And, any specific
>         surveillance is only authorized by court, case by case. While
>         no one can prevent LE bypassing this procedure, cases built by
>         violating this requirement would be the ground for being
>         thrown out of the court.
>
>         4) However, in the Internet environment, largely, if not most,
>         Addresses are dynamic. There is no way to specify an IP
>         Address for surveillance of a suspect. This gives the LE the
>         perfect excuse to scoop up everything and then analyze
>         offline. This gives them plenty of time to try various ways to
>         decrypt the encoded messages and the opportunity to sift
>         through everything for incidental "surprise bonus finds". The
>         result is that practically no privacy is left for anyone. is
>         means that all of the schemes of scrambling IP Addresses are
>         useless at the end. So, why do we bother with doing so, at all?
>
>     Abe,
>
>     Happy New Year!
>
>     Your argument seems to be that we shouldn't bother with things
>     like security or encryption at all :-) While it's true that
>     anything sent into the Internet can be intercepted and analyzed
>     offline, it's clearly the intent of security and
>     privacy mechanisms to make offline analysis of data ineffective or
>     at least cost prohibitive. For encryption the calculation is
>     pretty straightforward, the complexity and cost and breaking a
>     cipher is generally correlated to the key size. So for any given
>     key size, it can be determined what sort of resources are required
>     to break the code. This is a continuous escalation as attackers
>     gain access for more computational resources and there are
>     breakthroughs like in quantum computing that require rethinking
>     encryption.  But regardless, the effectiveness of encryption at
>     any given point of time is quantifiable.
>
>     For security and privacy in IP addresses I believe we should be
>     similarly taking a quantitative approach. This is where RFC7721
>     fails. The recommendation of RFC7721 is that for better security,
>     use temporary addresses with shorter lifetimes. But the RFC
>     doesn't attempt to quantify the relationship between address
>     lifetime and the security that's offered or even say what specific
>     lifetime is recommended for optimal security. For instance, if the
>     user changes their interface address twice a day instead of once a
>     day does that halve the chances that some may breach their
>     security by correlating two different flows that they source from
>     the user? Probably not. But, what if they change their address
>     every five minutes? How much better is that than changing the
>     address once a day? It's intuitive that it should be better
>     security, but is it _really_ better? And if it is better, are
>     the benefits worth the aggravation of changing the address. This
>     is quite similar to some companies that have a policy that
>     everyone needs to change their passwords periodically. Studies
>     have shown that there is little quantitative value in doing this
>     and in fact the net effect is likely less security and increased
>     user aggravation-- even so, companies will continue to do this
>     because it's easier to stick with the inertia of intuition.
>
>     The fix for the password problem is one time passwords (OTP) and
>     IMO that hints at the fix for the address security problems
>     described in RFC7712, essentially we need single use source
>     addresses per each connection.  The security effects of single use
>     addresses are quantifiable, i.e. given sample packets from
>     independent two flows generated by the same user, without
>     additional information it isn't possible for a third party to
>     correlate that they are sourced by the same user.
>
>     Tom
>
>         Happy New Year!
>
>         Abe (2021-12-27 21:59)
>
>         On 2021-12-23 22:26, Jiayihao wrote:
>
>             Hello Abe,
>
>             Users are unwilling to be watched by any parties(ISP, and
>             ICP also) excepts users themselves. Actually I would like
>             to divide the arguments into 2 case: network layers and
>             below (not completely but mostly controlled by ISP);
>             transport layers and above (not completely but mostly
>             controlled by ICP).
>
>             1) For transport layers and above, Encryption Everywhere
>             (like TLS) is a good tool to provide user privacy.
>             However, it is only a tool against ISPs, while ICPs
>             survive and keep gaining revenue (even by selling data
>             like the negative news of Facebook, or Meta, whatever you
>             call it). As discussed, it is not networks faults because
>             IP provides peer-to-peer already. You may blame CGNAT in
>             ISP increasingly contributes to a C/S mode in replacing
>             P2P, like in China where IPv4 addresses are scare and
>             CGNAT is almost everywhere. However, I don’t find the
>             situation any better in U.S. where most of IPv4 address
>             are located. It is a business choice to overwrite the mode
>             to be peer-ICP-peer(C/S mode) at application layer, other
>             than utilize the P2P mode that natively provided by IP.
>
>             In this case, there are trust points and they are ICPs.
>
>             2) For network layers and below, ISP and IP still provide
>             a pure P2P network, and Encryption in TLS do not blind ISP
>             in IP layer since IP header is still in plaintext and
>             almost controlled by ISP. That is to say, in an access
>             network scenario, the access network provide can see every
>             trace of every user at network layer level (although
>             exclude the encrypted payload). To against this, one can
>             use Proxy(i.e., VPN, Tor) to bypass the trace analysis
>             just like the CGNAT does. The only difference is that
>             detour points (Proxies) belong to a third party, not ISP.
>
>             In this case, there are trust points and they are third
>             party proxies.
>
>             The bottom line is that trust points are everywhere
>             explicitly or implicitly, and privacy can be leaked from
>             every (trust) point that you trust (or have business
>             with). No matter what network system you have, no matter
>             it is PSTN or ATM, these trust points are just the weak
>             points for your privacy, and the only things users can beg
>             is that **ALL** trust points are 1) well behave/don’t be
>             evil; 2)system is advanced enough that can’t be hacked by
>             any others; 3) protected by law.
>
>             I would say pretty challenging and also expecting to reach
>             that.
>
>             Network itself just cannot be bypassed in reaching that.
>
>             Merry Christmas,
>
>             Yihao
>
>             *From:* Abraham Y. Chen <[e-mail]>
>             <mailto:[e-mail]>
>             *Sent:* 2021年12月23日 10:01
>             *To:* Jiayihao <[e-mail]>
>             <mailto:[e-mail]>
>             *Cc:* [e-mail]; [e-mail]
>             *Subject:* Re: [Int-area] Where/How is the features
>             innovation, happening? Re: 202112221726.AYC
>             *Importance:* High
>
>             Hi, YiHao:
>
>             0)    I am glad that you distilled the complex and elusive
>             privacy / security tradeoff issues to a very unique and
>             concise perspective.
>
>             1)    Yes, the IPv4 CG-NAT and IPv6 Temporary address may
>             seem to provide some privacy protection. However, with the
>             availability of the computing power, these (and others
>             such as VPN) approaches may be just ostrich mentality.  On
>             the other hand, they provide the perfect excuse for the
>             government (at least US) to justify for "mass
>             surveillance". For example, the following is a recent news
>             report which practically defeats all current "privacy
>             protection" attempts.
>
>             https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/12/08/federal-court-upholds-terrorism-conviction-mass-surveillance-case/6440325001/
>
>             */[jiayihao] there is no doubt./*
>
>             2)    Rather than contradicting efforts, it is time to
>             review whether any of these schemes such as mapping
>             techniques really is effective for the perceived
>             "protection". As much of the current science fiction type
>             crime scene detective novel / movie / TV program hinted,
>             the government probably has more capability to zero-in on
>             anyone than an ordinary citizen can imagine, anyway. And,
>             businesses have gathered more information about us than
>             they will ever admit. Perhaps we should "think out of the
>             box" by going back to the PSTN days of definitive
>             subscriber identification systems, so that accordingly we
>             will behave appropriately on the Internet, and the
>             government will be allowed to only monitor suspected
>             criminals by filing explicit (although in secret)
>             requests, case by case, to the court for approval?
>
>             Happy Holidays!
>
>             Abe (2021-12-22 21:00 EST)
>
>             Hello Tom,
>
>               
>
>             The privacy countermeasure for IPv4/IPv6 is interestingly different.
>
>             IPv4 usually utilize CGNAT, i.e., M(hosts)-to-N(IPs), where M >> N so that the host could remain anonymous
>
>             IPv6 usually utilize Temporary address, i.e., 1(host)-to-M(IPs[at least suffix level]), where M >> 1 so that the host could remain anonymous.
>
>               
>
>             HOWEVER, I don't feel any approach reaches privacy perfectly, because access network have a global perspective on M-to-N or 1-to-M mapping.
>
>             For this, it is hard to be convinced that IPv4/6 itself can reach a perfect privacy.
>
>               
>
>             Thanks,
>
>             Yihao Jia
>
>               
>
>             -----------
>
>               
>
>             I believe CGNAT is better than IPv6 in terms of privacy in addressing.
>
>             In fact one might argue that IPv4 provides better privacy and security
>
>             than IPv6 in this regard. Temporary addresses are not single use which
>
>             means the attacker can correlate addresses from a user between
>
>             unrelated flows during the quantum the temporary address is used. When
>
>             a user changes their address, the attacker can continue monitoring if
>
>             it is signaled that the address changed. Here is a fairly simple
>
>             exploit I derived to do that (from
>
>             draft-herbert-ipv6-prefix-address-privacy-00).
>
>               
>
>             The exploit is:
>
>                    o An attacker creates an "always connected" app that provides some
>
>                      seemingly benign service and users download the app.
>
>                    o The app includes some sort of persistent identity. For instance,
>
>                      this could be an account login.
>
>                    o The backend server for the app logs the identity and IP address
>
>                      of a user each time they connect
>
>                    o When an address change happens, existing connections on the user
>
>                      device are disconnected. The app will receive a notification and
>
>                      immediately attempt to reconnect using the new source address.
>
>                    o The backend server will see the new connection and log the new
>
>                      IP address as being associated with the specific user. Thus,
>
>             the server has
>
>                      a real-time record of users and the IP address they are using.
>
>                    o The attacker intercepts packets at some point in the Internet.
>
>                      The addresses in the captured packets can be time correlated
>
>                      with the server database to deduce identities of parties in
>
>                      communications that are unrelated to the app.
>
>               
>
>             The only way I see to mitigate this sort of surveillance is single use
>
>             addresses. That is effectively what  CGNAT can provide.
>
>               
>
>             Tom
>
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