{"id":186343,"date":"2014-02-23T21:11:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-24T02:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/02\/23\/why-do-i-see-the-nsa-behind-this-sh\/"},"modified":"2014-02-23T21:11:00","modified_gmt":"2014-02-24T02:11:00","slug":"why-do-i-see-the-nsa-behind-this-sh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/02\/23\/why-do-i-see-the-nsa-behind-this-sh\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Do I See the NSA Behind This Sh%$?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Internet Engineering Task Force has proposed a way to speed up encrypted connections that works by removing the encryption for part of the journey<\/a>. Rather unsurprisingly it looks like a way allow the NSA, FBI, etc. to crawl up your ass into your encrypted data:<\/p>\n

A draft put forward at the Internet Engineering Task Force has drawn the ire of prominent privacy activist Lauren Weinstein as \u201cone of the most alarming Internet proposals\u201d he’s ever seen.<\/span><\/p>\n

The document that’s upset Weinstein is this<\/a> one, out of the HTTPBis Working Group and posted as an Internet Draft on 14 February 2014.<\/span>

<\/span> Entitled Explicit Trusted Proxy in HTTP\/2.0<\/i>, the standard proposes a mechanism by which an upstream provider \u2013 say an ISP \u2013 could get permission to snoop on<\/strike> decrypt user traffic for the purposes of caching.<\/span>

<\/span> Using proxies to cache traffic in the service provider network is unremarkable and uncontroversial: it’s been normal practice for a long time. The end user benefit is better performance; the service provider benefit is a reduction in traffic over their upstream transit network links.<\/span>

<\/span> From that point of view, encryption is a pain in the neck: the service provider can’t see into the encrypted traffic, which reduces the effectiveness of its caching strategy.<\/span>

<\/span> The Internet Draft has this to say:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTo distinguish between an HTTP2 connection meant to transport “https” URIs resources and an HTTP2 connection meant to transport “http” URIs resource, the draft proposes to ‘register a new value in the Application Layer Protocol negotiation (ALPN) Protocol IDs registry specific to signal the usage of HTTP2 to transport “http” URIs resources: h2clr.’\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In essence, to try and protect their ability to cache, the authors of the standard propose that providers seek their customers’ permission to decrypt their traffic (solely for the purposes of offering a better customer experience, naturally).<\/span>

<\/span> For some reason, Weinstein finds this proposal outrageous: \u201cThe proposal expects Internet users to provide ‘informed consent’ that they ‘trust’ intermediate sites (e.g. Verizon, AT&T, etc.) to decode their encrypted data, process it in some manner for ‘presumably’ innocent purposes, re-encrypt it, then pass the re-encrypted data along to its original destination,\u201d he writes.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Considering that AT&T proposed this, and that AT&T’s record vis a vis illegal surveillance is pretty horrific, I do not see this as a positive proposal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Internet Engineering Task Force has proposed a way to speed up encrypted connections that works by removing the encryption for part of the journey. Rather unsurprisingly it looks like a way allow the NSA, FBI, etc. to crawl up your ass into your encrypted data: A draft put forward at the Internet Engineering Task …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,969,997,1041,1196,1025],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-evil","category-internet","category-law-enforcement-misconduct","category-privatization","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186343"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}