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Ban encryption without back doors. Some companies would withraw products, others would comply, maybe some others would protest for a while. After a while the o

Ban encryption without back doors. Some companies would withraw products, others would comply, maybe some others would protest for a while. After a while the only option left would be steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography At which point it seems unlikely they'd be able to do anything other than work on techniques to detect steganography (which they no doubt already do)... which leaves us with a steganographic arms race (which has probably already been the case for some time behind the scenes).

rvnt 11y ago
What are some valid alternatives/compromises we could work towards in order to prevent such drastic ideas from being incorporated into law?
andy_ppp 11y ago
I love the idea of using Facebook, Email, Youtube, Instagram etc. to tunnel Tor. Wonder how difficult it would be? It's probably already happening just look for slightly different duplicates of the same videos.
- throwaway7767 11y ago
  The problem here is that tor is largely focused on realtime communications, and stuffing packets through e.g. facebook chat would probably be too slow. It would work great for another anonymity network that was more message-focused with no realtime needs. That said, you might be interested in tor's meek pluggable transport: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek Essentially, the idea is that someone buys a VPS hosted on a cloud service with common ingress IPs (such as Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, etc). Tor clients then connect to it, sending an innocent-looking domain (gmail.com or something) in the TLS SNI header, and then only in the datastream protected by TLS do they expose the tor protocol. This is of course useless against NSA and GCHQ, which have access to all these cloud providers, but it's very useful for example for people behind restrictive country-level firewalls as the authorities are reluctant to block such large services and it's hard for them to distinguish this from normal traffic.

rvnt 11y ago

What are some valid alternatives/compromises we could work towards in order to prevent such drastic ideas from being incorporated into law?

andy_ppp 11y ago

I love the idea of using Facebook, Email, Youtube, Instagram etc. to tunnel Tor. Wonder how difficult it would be? It's probably already happening just look for slightly different duplicates of the same videos.

throwaway7767 11y ago
The problem here is that tor is largely focused on realtime communications, and stuffing packets through e.g. facebook chat would probably be too slow. It would work great for another anonymity network that was more message-focused with no realtime needs. That said, you might be interested in tor's meek pluggable transport: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek Essentially, the idea is that someone buys a VPS hosted on a cloud service with common ingress IPs (such as Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, etc). Tor clients then connect to it, sending an innocent-looking domain (gmail.com or something) in the TLS SNI header, and then only in the datastream protected by TLS do they expose the tor protocol. This is of course useless against NSA and GCHQ, which have access to all these cloud providers, but it's very useful for example for people behind restrictive country-level firewalls as the authorities are reluctant to block such large services and it's hard for them to distinguish this from normal traffic.