5 ms·

Ransom: Routing Around Nation-States

103 points by chmaynard 8y ago

gcommer 8y ago
Looks very similar to http://alibi.cs.umd.edu/ http://alibi.cs.umd.edu/ but doesn't reference it and doesn't seem to have actually been published (?) Also, maybe the title should mention this is from 2016.
- chmaynard 8y ago
  See also: https://ransom.cs.princeton.edu/pdf/surveillance.pdf https://ransom.cs.princeton.edu/pdf/surveillance.pdf https://ransom.cs.princeton.edu/system.html https://ransom.cs.princeton.edu/system.html
  - mirimir 8y ago
    From the PDF: > There has been research into circumvention systems, particularly for censorship circumvention, that is related this work, but not sufficient for surveillance circumvention. Tor is an anonymity system that uses three relays and layered encryption to allow users to communicate anonymously [19]. VPNGate is a public VPN relay system aimed at circumventing national firewalls [40]. Unfortunately, VPNGate does not allow a client to choose any available VPN, which makes surveillance avoidance harder. That's damn cursory.
devoply 8y ago
NSA: et tu, Princeton?
- schoen 8y ago
  I doubt NSA is that mad at Princeton overall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Defense_Analyses#Center_for_Communications_and_Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Defense_Analyses...
dev_dull 8y ago
Does this really "move the needle" in terms of security? TLS should be sufficient to allow your traffic to enter and exit hostile territory.
- marzell 8y ago
  May be somewhat of a philosophical argument if you are limiting it to viewing the content of packets. However, there is still a ton of data that can be leaked that could be considered sensitive - volume of transactions, where they are routing from/to, the frequency distribution of that volume. Also, there is also the possibility for manipulation of transmissions - blocking/dropping them altogether causing service outages/censorship, delay/deprioritization that could affect markets, etc. At the nation-state level, this provides a lot of useful opportunities for bad actors.
- smokeyj 8y ago
  If you could avoid certain pipes it could only help security. Even with the security of TLS, that doesn't prevent state-level actors from observing meta data with the advantage of internet-wide timing data, which could be useful for say, analyzing TOR traffic. Not a crypto expert but doesn't trusting TLS imply trusting root certs on your PC? Regardless, the Snowden leaks showed that internet traffic can be modified to contain harmful payloads for targeted individuals. Even if only susceptible over non-TLS it still represents a non-zero percentage of internet traffic.
  - dev_dull 8y ago
    Who will you even "avoid"? It's in the interest of every major country to do surveillance.
    - TaylorAlexander 8y ago
      It may seem equally compelling to all countries, but in practice some countries put huge resources in to gathering everything, and some don’t. Avoiding the ones that in practice collect everything in favor of ones that in practice don’t would increase security. Separately, we should stay mindful of who is doing this collection, and simultaneously take additional measures to secure our communications.
jvehent 8y ago
Maybe don't install random PAC files in your main browser profile, unless you enjoy surrounding control over your web browsing to a third party. Instead, install this in a separate profile.
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  Where's the PAC? People will often surrender control of their systems for less (watching Netflix, accessing thepiratebay)
  - voltagex_ 8y ago
    Found it - https://ransom.cs.princeton.edu/pacs/au_uk_pac.pac https://ransom.cs.princeton.edu/pacs/au_uk_pac.pac, substitute two letter country codes. Seems oddly specific. In that example, only Yahoo, BBC and XHamster (nsfw) are re-routed.
bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
> In some cases, countries are taking extreme steps, such as building new Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), which allow networks to interconnect directly, and encouraging local interconnection to keep local traffic local. We find that although many of these efforts are extensive, they are often futile, due to the inherent lack of hosting and route diversity for many popular sites. Anyone with a background of datacenter, IDC or VPS knows a simple fact: most of the time, the default routes are often sub-optimal. Even if you are using a CDN, sometimes the traffic just doesn't terminated at the local/nearest/best-connected datacenter of your CDN provider, but a remote datacenter, sometimes in another country. Pretty frustrating. Because the traffic travels through the cheapest and/or the most convenient path, not the shortest path, and it also depends on your physical location, your ISP, the network topology of your local ISP, the national/international infrastructure, etc. Finding the optimal path for a specific ISP is a pretty tricky task. My networking-guru friends have the ability to learn the interconnections of different datacenter through the BGP looking glass, and identify the fastest VPS to rent based on their experience in the industry, the knowledge of the national/international infrastructure (which core router the network is using? which submarine cable does this ISP use? which national subnet of the ISP is the server located?, etc). It is very common that your traffic have to travel around the entire Earth, and crossing USA in the middle, even if you are just connecting to a nearby continent. Sadly, there is almost nothing anyone can do to about it.
- slededit 8y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if the EU passed a law requiring domestic traffic to stay domestic. You could even argue existing privacy laws require it already - it just hasn't been enforced in that way. It's not a hard problem to work around if ISPs were sufficiently motivated to deal with it.
  - detaro 8y ago
    A few German ISPs/internet companies made noise about keeping traffic locally during the Snowden leaks, some were slightly miffed when others pointed out that it would already be the case if they played ball and freely peered with everyone at the German IXPs. (Although with the biggest one of those being monitored by German intelligence agencies with whatever filtering rules the NSA gave them fairly pointless too)
voltagex_ 8y ago
https://ransom.cs.princeton.edu/pacs/ https://ransom.cs.princeton.edu/pacs/ - seems a bit strange, there's only a few sets of options, each with only a few sites.

103 points by chmaynard 8y ago

Looks very similar to http://alibi.cs.umd.edu/ http://alibi.cs.umd.edu/ but doesn't reference it and doesn't seem to have actually been published (?) Also, maybe the title should mention this is from 2016.

chmaynard 8y ago
See also: https://ransom.cs.princeton.edu/pdf/surveillance.pdf https://ransom.cs.princeton.edu/pdf/surveillance.pdf https://ransom.cs.princeton.edu/system.html https://ransom.cs.princeton.edu/system.html
- mirimir 8y ago
  From the PDF: > There has been research into circumvention systems, particularly for censorship circumvention, that is related this work, but not sufficient for surveillance circumvention. Tor is an anonymity system that uses three relays and layered encryption to allow users to communicate anonymously [19]. VPNGate is a public VPN relay system aimed at circumventing national firewalls [40]. Unfortunately, VPNGate does not allow a client to choose any available VPN, which makes surveillance avoidance harder. That's damn cursory.

devoply 8y ago

NSA: et tu, Princeton?

schoen 8y ago
I doubt NSA is that mad at Princeton overall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Defense_Analyses#Center_for_Communications_and_Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Defense_Analyses...

dev_dull 8y ago

Does this really "move the needle" in terms of security? TLS should be sufficient to allow your traffic to enter and exit hostile territory.

marzell 8y ago
May be somewhat of a philosophical argument if you are limiting it to viewing the content of packets. However, there is still a ton of data that can be leaked that could be considered sensitive - volume of transactions, where they are routing from/to, the frequency distribution of that volume. Also, there is also the possibility for manipulation of transmissions - blocking/dropping them altogether causing service outages/censorship, delay/deprioritization that could affect markets, etc. At the nation-state level, this provides a lot of useful opportunities for bad actors.
smokeyj 8y ago
If you could avoid certain pipes it could only help security. Even with the security of TLS, that doesn't prevent state-level actors from observing meta data with the advantage of internet-wide timing data, which could be useful for say, analyzing TOR traffic. Not a crypto expert but doesn't trusting TLS imply trusting root certs on your PC? Regardless, the Snowden leaks showed that internet traffic can be modified to contain harmful payloads for targeted individuals. Even if only susceptible over non-TLS it still represents a non-zero percentage of internet traffic.
- dev_dull 8y ago
  Who will you even "avoid"? It's in the interest of every major country to do surveillance.
  - TaylorAlexander 8y ago
    It may seem equally compelling to all countries, but in practice some countries put huge resources in to gathering everything, and some don’t. Avoiding the ones that in practice collect everything in favor of ones that in practice don’t would increase security. Separately, we should stay mindful of who is doing this collection, and simultaneously take additional measures to secure our communications.

jvehent 8y ago

Maybe don't install random PAC files in your main browser profile, unless you enjoy surrounding control over your web browsing to a third party. Instead, install this in a separate profile.

voltagex_ 8y ago
Where's the PAC? People will often surrender control of their systems for less (watching Netflix, accessing thepiratebay)
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  Found it - https://ransom.cs.princeton.edu/pacs/au_uk_pac.pac https://ransom.cs.princeton.edu/pacs/au_uk_pac.pac, substitute two letter country codes. Seems oddly specific. In that example, only Yahoo, BBC and XHamster (nsfw) are re-routed.

bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago

> In some cases, countries are taking extreme steps, such as building new Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), which allow networks to interconnect directly, and encouraging local interconnection to keep local traffic local. We find that although many of these efforts are extensive, they are often futile, due to the inherent lack of hosting and route diversity for many popular sites. Anyone with a background of datacenter, IDC or VPS knows a simple fact: most of the time, the default routes are often sub-optimal. Even if you are using a CDN, sometimes the traffic just doesn't terminated at the local/nearest/best-connected datacenter of your CDN provider, but a remote datacenter, sometimes in another country. Pretty frustrating. Because the traffic travels through the cheapest and/or the most convenient path, not the shortest path, and it also depends on your physical location, your ISP, the network topology of your local ISP, the national/international infrastructure, etc. Finding the optimal path for a specific ISP is a pretty tricky task. My networking-guru friends have the ability to learn the interconnections of different datacenter through the BGP looking glass, and identify the fastest VPS to rent based on their experience in the industry, the knowledge of the national/international infrastructure (which core router the network is using? which submarine cable does this ISP use? which national subnet of the ISP is the server located?, etc). It is very common that your traffic have to travel around the entire Earth, and crossing USA in the middle, even if you are just connecting to a nearby continent. Sadly, there is almost nothing anyone can do to about it.

slededit 8y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if the EU passed a law requiring domestic traffic to stay domestic. You could even argue existing privacy laws require it already - it just hasn't been enforced in that way. It's not a hard problem to work around if ISPs were sufficiently motivated to deal with it.
- detaro 8y ago
  A few German ISPs/internet companies made noise about keeping traffic locally during the Snowden leaks, some were slightly miffed when others pointed out that it would already be the case if they played ball and freely peered with everyone at the German IXPs. (Although with the biggest one of those being monitored by German intelligence agencies with whatever filtering rules the NSA gave them fairly pointless too)

voltagex_ 8y ago

https://ransom.cs.princeton.edu/pacs/ https://ransom.cs.princeton.edu/pacs/ - seems a bit strange, there's only a few sets of options, each with only a few sites.