Internet Standards and Surveillance by Design
| Comments from IETF worker,(www.ietf.org) | |
| Jon Crowcroft (jon@cs.ucl.ac.uk) | |
| Internet Staff Member, and currently | |
| Member of Internet Architecture Board (www.iab.org) |
| Professor of Computer Science, University College London (http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/jon/) | |
| Worked on Internet Protocols for 20 years | |
| Funded by DARPA, HMG, and EU and industry. |
| RFC1984 states IAB and IESG views on requirements for best strength privacy | |
| Recent IETF discussion on legal intercept/wiretap, I.e. consequenecs of CALEA | |
| Also, a few words about the non-implementabilty of RIP |
| IETF is representative of individual engineers | ||
| IESG provide technical leadership | ||
| IAB provide strategic guidance | ||
| Volunteer organisations – M.O. is best expressed as “Rough Consensus and Working Code” | ||
| Very unlike ITU/ETSI (with whom we have liason agreements) which are government or treaty orgs – we are answerable to our membership, which is anyone and everyone. | ||
| Next generation mobile, TV and even fixed telephone nets will all be based on IP like principles (if not n IPv4 or IPv6) | |
| To get commodity value and prices, you need to use this technology – when you do this, it gets provided by all to all – there are no more telco/PTT/PNO oligarchies…. |
| Open Access to Strong Crypto is non negotiable for technical reasons. It is a mandatory requirement. | |
| Specialised Technology in the form of standards are a non requirement in IP networks. At the application level, intercept is easy; at the IP level, impossible. |
| Strong crypto is needed for operation and maintenance – preferably public key crypto with certification chains (like PGP) | |
| Needed for safety of critical infrastructure, but service providers and users are indistinguishable in the Internet – hence must be available to all. |
| Dynamic Routing | |
| Multiple administrations (>40,000 ISPs) | |
| Asymmetric inter-domain (BGP) routes – most international paths involve 3 or more administrations if you want to trace a conversation. | |
| Triangular mobile IP routes | |
| Multicast anonymity, Etc etc etc |
IP level intercept considered braindead
| First you need to capture and filter packets on fiber in most core and inter-tier-1 provider points at >10Gbps now. Computers don’t have fast enough memory or buses to store more than a couple of seconds of this. In 2001, UK academic nets, for example, would require 2 terabits per second worth of storage. You can’t filter, ship or store this: | |
| Say you need to ship it somewhere – over what network? The net would have to be the square of its current speed – the agencies can’t afford this … |
| I can rehearse the arguments from RFC1984, and I could re-summarise the raven debate on CALEA and IP but these are all available online | |
| What is necessary in the EU is to inject some technical clue into the service provider community, imho, ASAP |