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Study Confirms ISPs Meddle With Web Traffic
Posted by
Soulskill
on Thu Apr 17, 2008 11:15 PM
from the you-wouldn't-like-me-when-i'm-angry dept.
from the you-wouldn't-like-me-when-i'm-angry dept.
Last July, a research team from the University of Washington released an online tool to analyze whether web pages were being altered during the transit from web server to user. On Wednesday, the team released a paper at the Usenix conference analyzing the data collected from the tool. The found, unsurprisingly, that ISPs were indeed injecting ads into web pages viewed by a small number of users. The paper is available at the Usenix site. From PCWorld:
"To get their data, the team wrote software that would test whether or not someone visiting a test page on the University of Washington's Web site was viewing HTML that had been altered in transit. In 16 instances ads were injected into the Web page by the visitor's Internet Service provider. The service providers named by the researchers are generally small ISPs such as RedMoon, Mesa Networks and MetroFi, but the paper also named one of the largest ISPs in the U.S., XO Communications, as an ad injector."
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Technology: Tool Detects "In-Flight" Webpage Alterations 197 comments
TheWoozle writes "In a follow-up to a recent story about ISPs inserting ads into web pages, the University of Washington security and privacy research group has teamed with the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) to develop an online tool to help you identify if your ISP is inserting ads or otherwise modifying the web pages you request."
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common carrier? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:common carrier? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
This is because ISPs aren't common carriers in the first place.
Re:common carrier? (Score:5, Interesting)
Good question... though I am sure that they can claim it is an automated, non-selective process which might put things in their favor in such regards.
On a similar note, there was a lawsuit a while back about some ISP doing this (and violating the page owner's copyright - which I think got squashed because it was part of the agreement for the free service)... I wonder how something like that would go through today in this type of circumstance - or if the ISPs are going to start changing their TOS's as needed to cover this.
Parent
USA ISPs are NOT common carriers! (Score:5, Informative)
Cable Internet Service Not Common Carrier [slashdot.org]
Corollary:
FCC Reclassifies DSL, Drops Common Carrier Rules [slashdot.org]
I'm not rooting for this, but we need to try harder for an actual solution rather than seek the unicorn of a "solution" that didn't/no longer exists.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Unicorn - Where's BadAnalogyGuy when we need him?
Re:USA ISPs are NOT common carriers! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"Disturbing telecommunications" is punishable up to two years in prison. And if you are what I think "common carrier" means the minimum penalty is four months jail time.
The law seems (IANAL) to be written so that ISPs are "common carriers" according to this law.
Re: (Score:2)
It normally means the companies who own/run the public part of the network. ISP's generally plug a private network into the public one through a PABX or similar. Phone companies who are also ISP's usually do it via a subsiduary.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
No, their status does not change.
Internet service does not have common carrier status.
Internet service does not have common carrier status.
Internet service does not have common carrier status.
2005 Slashdot story on a US Supreme Court ruling:
Cable Internet Service Not Common Carrier [slashdot.org]
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Gah (Score:5, Insightful)
And using the law as just some excuse to jail someone you don't like, even via some convoluted fallacy, is not how the rule of the law was supposed to work. And not just from a moral right vs wrong point of view, but it also takes away quite a bit out of the deterrence factor of the law and police. After all, if you know that (A) whether you get convicted or not depends more on whims, friends, or being in the wrong time at the wrong place, and (B) whatever you did, chances are decent they'll find a scapegoat to make an example of, instead of finding you, just says you have more chances to get away with something genuinely criminal.
We tried using spectacular shows of making an example of some bystander, to scare the criminals. Heck, half of the medieval justice worked like that, and the communist block kept at it until the bitter end. It doesn't really work well.
And in this case it would also create the precedent that _any_ content you serve can get you in PMITA state prison. There's nothing to say that only ISP's inserted ads can be demonized and victimized in your setup. Any site, regardless of whether it's serving ads, or is a free forum like Slashdot, or sells stuff on the internet, or is some company's web presence on the net, etc, could be hacked to serve malware, adware, spam, phishing, redirects to other sites, etc. Some of which, yes, porn or to porn.
So what do you propose? That if your company's site can be hacked like that, the CEO goes to jail? Well then how about we take that to the logical end then and give some responsibility in it to the guys who programmed those vulnerabilities too? Or to the admins who didn't secure the servers right? To the security teams who didn't find some glaring vulnerabilities? To the PHB's and developers who had an "auugh, those security guys are just bullies, blowing stuff out of proportion to make me look bad!" attitude and pulled all sorts of strings to get the severity rating lowered? To the beancounters who got a bonus for slashing the budget for security? To the controlling guy who insisted on hiring only the cheapest burger-flippers who had a crash-course in Java, as a cost saving measure? To the level 1 support monkeys who advised someone to disable his firewall and/or disable his virus scanner, just to install a stupid game or access some vuln-laden site? To the idiot who wrote that canned list of answers? Etc.
I mean, if it counts as "endangering the children" if you have some vulnerability that _could_ be used against children, then, seriously, there are a _lot_ of people who had a hand in creating that vulnerability, not just the CEO. That's a lot of jails we'll need.
You'll also notice that it just doesn't say "stop tampering with the sites". It just says that if you can be hacked, you can go to jail. So if you're sure enough of your code and your admins to be on the internet at all, then you're sure enough to mangle the web pages too. E.g., if you're sure enough that your ad server is secure enough to use it on your web site, then you're sure enough to use it in other people's pages too. After all, if it were hacked to serve kiddie porn, it would serve it on your own site too.
No. If it has to be stopped, it has to be a clear law and applied uniformly. The idea isn't even new. Any country has laws against tampering with snail mail. Make it illegal to mess with someone's electronics communications, and apply it impartially and uniformly.
Parent
Re:Gah (Score:5, Insightful)
But you are also idealistic. And you belong in the Jefferson era.
Your approach would not work in today's times, where corporates rule the roost without even having a vote or responsibility.
Laws can be circumvented easily through stooges, loopholes, sympathetic judges, presidents-pardoning-criminals, etc.
At a time when might is right, it makes sense to apply the same rules to those twist the law and cheat. Take for instance Microsoft's recent troubles: Its EULA clearly state XP is NOT sold, but only licensed, to prevent us from tampering or reselling it. The same EULA was used by one US State to force Microsoft to pay taxes on such license fees. Microsoft tried to weasel out, but was caught by its own EULA. Now they can't avoid paying taxes because their EULA says its license fees, and they can't remove the EULA, because hackers would have a field day in selling legitimate copies of modified XP!
If large corporates can change the spirit of the law to suit themselves and perform unethical and clearly border-illegal acts like throttling, disconnecting without notice, then so can we.
After all US has the Super 501 laws which state that any country's laws which are discriminative against US products would have those same laws adopted by US against them!
If the government says its OK to have an eye-for-eye attitude, then it is OK for me too!
Parent
Re:common carrier? (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't, but nevertheless, common carriers are not liable for the goods and data transported. That's why the USPS doesn't face trafficing charges every time someone mails illegal drugs and the phone company isn't charged as a co-conspiritor if someone uses the phone to plan a robbery.
Without the legal recognition of common carriers, there could not be phones, mail, or any sort of shipping. The criminal liabilities would be too great to even consider.
Parent
Thank goodness (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Please note the following... (Score:5, Interesting)
b: Most modifications, at least from the client viewpoint (and excluding the exploitable vulnerabilities which were discovered) are benign. 70% of the modifications were client-side proxies, such as personal firewalls, popup blockers, and add-removers.
Of the remaining, most other modifications where things like enterprise firewall services (which modify/insert Javascript checking code) and compression transformations (removing whitespace and/or routines for displaying downgraded images to save bandwidth).
Re: (Score:2)
b: Most modifications, at least from the client viewpoint (and excluding the exploitable vulnerabilities which were discovered) are benign. 70% of the modifications were client-side proxies, such as personal firewalls, popup blockers, and add-removers.
Them inserting any ads on my web space would not be benign for a couple reasons: (1) I dont know of any bot or script that would do so without damaging the layout (and it took long enough to get some of them to work in the various flavors of IE, and Safari, Firefox and Opera). and since I have my own ads on there, and charge based off the fact that I control the rate, frequency and number of ads displayed at a time, it would also hurt me financially.
Of course, that doesn't apply to most people... and of
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Signed pages (pity it won't work) and SSL (Score:5, Interesting)
HTTPS is great, but involves a significant CPU cost per page and isn't friendly to web caches.
Signed pages, if static, could be signed once and stored. They'd also be cacheable with all the normal rules.
The main issue is key management. How do you get the signing key? Well, I'm pretty sure the HTTPS certificate key could be used to sign a page, though there might be risks to the integrity of the key. A better way would be to use a single HTTPS request to grab a signing key from the remote site.
Signatures could be just another HTTP header, so browsers without support would never even notice. An alternative would be a HTML comment after the close body tag. The HTTP header, though, would work for related resources like images as well, and for that reason would probably be much better.
Unfortunately, it's all useless because an ISP could trivially strip signatures from HTTP headers or pages if they wanted to mess with the page.
If this sort of thing keeps on happening sites will just have to start offering HTTPS for all communication. The dodgy ISPs will have lower cache hit rates and higher demand for external bandwidth, but they will have done it to themselves.
If only browsers would FINALLY include support for HTTP+TLS and for TLS upgrades, encryption could even be done transparently to the user.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Signed pages (pity it won't work) and SSL (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm all for STARTTLS support, but it's not clear to me how it would be any more or less transparent from the user perspective than HTTPS. What am I missing?
Re:Signed pages (pity it won't work) and SSL (Score:5, Insightful)
What it's not is transparent to the web developer, host, and server.
With STARTLS the restriction of one SSL host per IP address/port pair is lifted. That permits WAY more sites to use SSL, and allows its use without a redirect to a different host and/or port. The user won't see a different URL, there's no protocol string change, etc.
It also allows a client to control whether or not it wants to use TLS, rather than having the server and web designer make those decisions for the client. The server can force the issue, but can also leave the option open to the client where appropriate.
I really like the idea of being able to configure my machine to automatically prefer TLS encryption for HTTP when I'm using, say, a wireless hotspot. I like the idea of being able to set my tech-illiterate parents' laptops up the same way even more.
It'd be particularly nice if combined with a new CA that was fast, cheap and fuss free at the cost of providing poor checking and verification (not like the current ones... *ahem*). Joe Blogger could get his SSL cert for TLS upgrades, and browsers could use it to help ensure encryption and communication integrity without ever suggesting to the user that the presence of the cert and protocol encryption implied anything about the identity or trustworthiness of the site operator.
Currently your options are self-signed (resulting in most browsers screaming loudly to the user), expensive but still poorly verified certs from people like Verisign, or in-between options like openca that most browsers treat as no different from just another self signed cert.
Personally I think the way browsers equate SSL with site trust is fundamentally flawed, and I think they've finally started to realize it, as evidenced by EV certificates and so on.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
HTTPS is great, but involves a significant CPU cost per page and isn't friendly to web caches.
We were doing 128-bit HTTPS connections ten years ago. Now I don't know how heavy hardware they used or how big that penalty is, but I'd be surprised if a decent server can't handle it, my box does P2P with encrypted transfers without breaking much of a sweat. As for web caches, HTTP less video/audio streaming like youtube is about 20% of Internet traffic. That means 80% aren't in the web caches and less traffic to fill the cache plus more dynamic content that can't be cached I think we're even lower. The
Cant see the story... (Score:5, Funny)
There is NOTHING wrong with this..... (Score:2)
22 x (5x60x60=18000) = 396000 kb
if they force me to download one 75kB ad per page, say once per min. that would be (5x60x75x8=180000 bits or 180kb)
180 kb / 396000 kb = 0.0454545% OR $0.50 per week.
That would mean lowering my bill by an estimated average of $2.00 per month.
For that to happen require
Re: (Score:2)
On a completely unrelated matter, we are experiencing some unexpected increases in the fees were paying due to the increased cost of oil coupled with the devaluation of the dollar against the euro ( I'm sure you must have read about it in the news) , So we are forced to increase rates with a $5.00 per month "Save the Future" fee. Take p
duh (Score:2, Informative)
Don't Give Virgin Media Ideas (Score:2)
I charge for ads (Score:5, Interesting)
If an ISP starts inserting ads of my competitors on any of my web sites, that would be totally unacceptable behavior.
Does this occur when a client's ISP passes traffic from my host to the customer's client? If so, I don't know how I could monitor that or even detect it unless the client user notified me.
I'd like to hear more on this subject.
Re:I charge for ads (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
It's Started (Score:4, Interesting)
All the huge communications/entertainment corporations and every government in the world have been trying for years to get control of the internet and make money off it/control it. It looks like the big push is on. The ISP's want to start throttling bandwidth and content, then raking in the cash from both ends. Governments have finally figured out that they can get what they want by bribery instead of just the threat of legislation, and so has the entertainment industry. They're all on the same page now, and all of us are squarely in their gun-sights.
It's time for those of us who value what we have here to wake up and start fighting back. The pressure is bound to get intense, and it's going to come from a lot of places. There's too much money to be made and too much power to be had in controlling the flow of information to a huge portion of the world's population.
I don't know whether the solution is technological, legal, some combination, or something completely different (like massive displays of civil disobedience, for example). But I'm utterly confident that if people don't start fighting back, we can all kiss access to unfiltered information goodbye.
And that will be a very, very dangerous thing.
Blocking content vs. modifying content (Score:4, Insightful)
We often complain about the efforts made by China and others in blocking Internet content. But how does this compare to modifying the content? With blocking you know it is blocked, but with modified content, can you tell? The ISP might say that it just puts ads on the pages, but would you trust it? Having a secret ISP framework for modifying content is a disaster waiting to happen. Personally, I think the web should go https.
Now we know why ISPs are so against Net Neutrality (Score:3, Interesting)
Toolkit for detecting changes to your own page (Score:5, Informative)
The toolkit requires you to run CGI scripts on your server to collect results, but we also have a web tripwire service that is easier to use (available on the same page above). Just add one line of JavaScript to your page, and our server will handle the integrity check and collect the results. We can then provide you with reports of the changes, much like Google Analytics.
We hope that by spreading web tripwires to other pages, we can at least deter ISPs from making further changes to web pages in-flight.
Kudos to the UW folks - one small problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
Great study, kudos etc, but one small heads up:
On visiting vancouver.cs.washington.edu (which you are encouraging people to digg and blog) I'm told that I have taken part in an experiment, many thanks, fait accompli - I'm not told (or at least, can't discover without extensive reading) what data has been gathered, whether it will be anaonymous, whether I can opt to withdraw etc.
Do you see where I'm going here...?
I really don't think the UW guys are going to be abusing this data, and they're doing it to
Legal? (Score:2)
Googling for _popupControl ... (Score:2)
How many other problems caused by injection are being blamed on the wrong parties?
Encrypt (Score:3, Interesting)
Why on Earth are we allowing anybody to read this traffic?
All new programs really need point to point encryption built in by default. As in, I want to design a new {whatever}: In programming I first decide how to secure the connection and encrypt the data. Second, I decide what I'm going to transfer, then the interface.
Post cards eventually led to folded paper with a wax seal to the letter inside a sealed envelope. Where is the same standard of privacy in Internet Clients that I expect when I mail something as simple as a greeting card?
Once Point to Point Encryption becomes the standard in all package design if the government wants to intercept and read my communications they'll have to do what the law says they have to do... Get a warrant. The same goes for my ISP or anyone else for that matter.
There's a reason all Internet use should be considered public. We're all shouting at the top of our lungs. Right now all they have to do is stand close enough to eavesdrop on a public communication that's out in the open.
Most of us on SlashDot are in the industry designing these Clients. Rather than complain, when you write your next Client why not design it securely?
-[d]-
Call it "Tampering" (Score:5, Insightful)
Names are powerful.
If an ISP modifies a web page, they are tampering. Putting their own ads there is impersonation
If an ISP puts your IP at the top of a RST they generated, they are packet forging.
If an ISP examines the data portion of a packet they are reading your content.
If they change the header (other than decrementing TTL or doing NAT) they are packet tampering.
And if they say it's to enhance user experience they are lying
Re:copyright issues (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:copyright issues (Score:5, Interesting)
The best analogy I can come up with is a kid delivering newspapers. You THINK the kid is just delivering the newspaper to you, but he is instead cutting out the advertisements (or god knows what else) and inserting his own client's advertisements while being paid for it.
Now of course, unlike a newspaper, a website does not get paid for the advertisements up front. So I cannot see this as anything other then stealing. We can argue the technicalities to death here, but the EFFECT is that the website was denied revenue from their ads, while the ISP gained ad revenue for themselves. Your question of compensation is interesting, but how could one gauge what that potential compensation could have been? Assume the individual would have clicked all the replaced ads on the page and then multiply for punitive damages?
I don't know about copyright violation as a complaint from the newspaper being a viable method to protect themselves. Is there legal protection afforded to websites that states the entire website must not be altered in any form during transit? Like I said I dunno.
What I find more foreboding is that you can no longer trust the "messenger". These ISP's absolutely MUST lose their common carrier status, since I believe that any ISP must remain impartial to the data being transmitted across its networks to have that status. Injecting advertisements into web sessions could not possibly be considered impartial. They have a direct financial motive to do so.
In order to protect their advertisement revenue streams websites may have to resort to strong measures, like encapsulating ALL of their traffic with HTTPS. That is just ridiculous.
I am sure that the proponents of Net Neutrality are going to enjoy their nice new shiny bullet.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I'd say it's more like he's inserting flyers. TFA didn't mention anything about ISPs removing or replacing ads in web pages while in transit, just adding more.
Re:Clearly it's the Commies! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Commies as in common carriers.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I suppose they aren't really high speed for the likes of Sweden or Japan, but in Canada, outside of business OC lines, I don't know of a
Re: (Score:2, Informative)