Surveillance states are possible

While clamping down on private encryption is bad policy, both for the economy and for privacy, I don't think it's technically impossible to implement. Let me draw a couple of comparisons to show why.

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As background, here is Cory Doctorow explaining, like many other commenters, that the Internet is too wild and wooly for major governments to possibly implement widespread surveillance:

For David Cameron's proposal to work, he will need to stop Britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of his jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.

With cellular phones, any phone that uses the relevant chunks of bandwidth is legally required to use certain protocols that are registered with the government. This has been bad economically, in that the telephone network has developed much more slowly than the relatively unregulated Internet. However, being bad economically has never exactly stopped rules from being put into place.

Yes, you can rig up a wireless network in your garage that breaks the rules. However, as soon as you try to use it over a wide geographic region, you're going to be relatively easy to catch. You will have to either broadcast a strong signal, or make use of the existing telephone backbone, or both.

To draw another comparison, consider the income tax. Income tax is easy to avoid with small operations, because you can just pay cash under the table. However, larger operations have to file a variety of paperwork, and the interlocking paperwork is what will get you. The more you take part in the above-ground economy, the harder it is to spin a big enough web of lies to get out of your taxes.

To get back to Internet protocols, it will certainly always be possible to break the rules on an isolated darknet you assemble in your garage. However, as soon as you send packets across the Internet backbone, any use of unregistered protocols is going to be very easy to detect.

To rub the point in further, don't forget that the authorities have no requirement to go after everyone who they detect doing something fishy. If they are anything like the American tax service, they'll randomly (or politically....) select people to target, and those people will then be required to undergo an audit at their own expense. If they survive the audit, the tax service just says "I'm sorry" and moves on to the next victim. Because of selective enforcement, law enforcement has no requirement to go after everyone using illegal encryption.

Of course all this is bad for the economy and for humanity's development at large. Don't oppose a cryptography clampdown because it's technically impossible, or you will look just as silly as the people that say DNS takedowns are technically impossible. Rather, oppose a cryptography clampdown because we don't want to live like that. We want to have private communications, and we want to allow innovation on the Internet. It's brand new, and if we clamp down on it, it will ossify in its current state the same way that the telephone network did.

DNS takedowns alive and well

I wrote earlier that PROTECT-IP and SOPA are getting relatively too much attention. Specifically, I mused about this problem:

First, DNS takedowns are already happening under existing law. For example, the American FBI has been taking down DNS names for poker websites in advance of a trial. SOPA and PROTECT-IP merely extend the tendrils rather than starting something new.

Today I read news that indeed, the FBI has taken down the DNS name for Megaupload.com. I'm not sure the American public is in tune with precisely what its federal government is doing.

The news has other sad aspects than the use of DNS takedowns. A few other aspects lept out for me:

• There has been not yet been a trial. If I ask most Americans about how their legal system works, I expect one of the first things people would say is that, in America, people are innocent until proven guilty.
• There is twenty years of jail time associated with the charges. Isn't that a little harsh for copyright violations? I think of jail as how you penalize murderers, arsonists, and others who are going to be a threat to the public if they are left loose. Intellectual property violations somehow seem to not make the cut.
• It's an American law, but New Zealand police arrested some of the defendants.
• The overall demeanor of the authorities comes off as rather thuggish. For example, they seized all manner of unrelated assets of the defendants, including their cars.

I am glad SOPA and PROTECT-IP went down. However, much of what protesters complained about is already happening.

DNS takedowns under fire in the U.S.

I get the impression that SOPA, the latest version of a U.S. bill to enable DNS takedowns of non-American web sites, is under a lot of pressure. A major blow to its support is that the major gaming console companies backing out.

I am certainly heartened. However, the problem is still very real, for at least two reasons.

First, DNS takedowns are already happening under existing law. For example, the American FBI has been taking down DNS names for poker websites in advance of a trial. SOPA and PROTECT-IP merely extend the tendrils rather than starting something new.

Second, this bill won't be the last. So long as the Internet uses DNS, there is a vulnerability built right into the protocols. Secure DNS doesn't make it any better; on the contrary, it hands the keys to the DNS over to national governments.

The only long term way to fix this problem is to adjust the protocols to avoid a single point of vulnerability. It requires a new way to name resources on the Internet.

Dan Wallach on fixing the certificate authorities

I like the latest ideas from Dan Wallach about building better infrastructure for browsers to detect impostor web sites.

First, there's this:

A straightforward idea is to track the certs you see over time and generate a prominent warning if you see something anomalous. This is available as a fully-functioning Firefox extension, Certificate Patrol. This should be built into every browser.

This is similar to pet names, but is more similar to the way SSH works. Like Pet Names, this approach will tell you if you visit a site and its certificate has changed. Unlike Pet Names, it won't say anything when you visit a new site. There's a trade off there. Either is a big improvement on the current state, though I suspect pet names could lead to a better overall user interface. The reason is that pet names can be integrated with the browser's bookmarks.

Second, there's this more speculative request:

In addition to your first-hand personal observations, why not leverage other resources on the network to make their own observations? For example, while Google is crawling the web, it can easily save SSL/TLS certificates when it sees them, and browsers could use a real-time API much like Google SafeBrowsing.

The Y property would give us this effect. What if, when you got a Google search result, it not only told you the URLs for the hits but also the certificates for those pages? You can then only be attacked if the attacker fools both you and also every Google web crawler.

Let me add one thing. If web protocols used these two tricks, how important would certificate authorities be? These two decentralized techniques strike me as so much more effective that certificate authorities are a waste of time. If you already know that a site is the same one you've visited a dozen times, and you already know it's the same site that Google thinks it is, what do you care about what some Iranian agency thinks of the site?

Certificate authority compromised

Wired reports:

In a fresh blow to the fundamental integrity of the internet, a hacker last week obtained legitimate web certificates that would have allowed him to impersonate some of the top sites on the internet, including the login pages used by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo e-mail customers.

As a rule of thumb, a system that requires the entire world to cooperate and do things right is unlikely to work very well. This is particularly true for security software, where the very point of the software is to defend against those that misbehave.

The good news is that TLS certificates aren't that effective anyway, so the breach didn't cause much harm. The harm is more like someone breaking through a gauzy curtain than someone breaking into a bank vault. Few people notice if they are even connected via http or https, and TLS only helps for https connections. As well, if you connect to bankammerica.com instead of bankamerica.com, certificates won't save you. Further, what exactly can a certification authority ever certify even if everything checks out? Pretty much all they can do is verify that you are connecting to the owner of the given DNS address. It doesn't mean that bankamerica.com is really the web site for the Bank of America you are trying to contact.

TLS certificates are a case of following a beautiful theory that mismatches reality. The theory is that people gain trust in a web site by having a lot of third-party certificates attesting to that web site's authenticity. The more reputable the sites, the better.

To see that this is an odd theory, consider how it is that we believe a person we are talking to is who we think they are. It's almost never because we checked their ID and are savvy enough to know whether it's a fake ID or not. A more plausible source of trust is that we recognize that we're talking to the same person we talked to yesterday. Another more likely way is that we were introduced to the person by someone else that we trust, so we tentatively start talking to the new person based on that contact.

There are web analogies for both of these processes. If we visit the same site two days in a row, our browsers could tell us this via an improved bookmarking system such as the Pet Names toolbar. If one site links to another site, then we gain confidence in the second site corresponding to how we thought about the first site. That's hyperlinking, and it could be improved by a system like YURLs.

Neither such mechanism, however, is getting much attention. The action is all in certificate chains. For some reason, engineers are fixating on an approach where truth descends down a hierarchy and where end users are able to study and act on these delivered truths. Web protocols would be better, it seems to me, if they relied on more realistic models of identification that mirror what we do in our social lives.