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Tool To Allow ISPs To Scan Every File You Transmit
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Oct 16, 2008 05:03 PM
from the in-case-they-run-out-of-human-tools dept.
from the in-case-they-run-out-of-human-tools dept.
timdogg writes "Brilliant Digital Entertainment, an Australian software company, has grabbed the attention of the NY attorney general's office with a tool they have designed that can scan every file that passes between an ISP and its customers. The tool can 'check every file passing through an Internet provider's network — every image, every movie, every document attached to an e-mail or found in a Web search — to see if it matches a list of illegal images.' As with the removal of the alt.binary newgroups, this is being promoted under the guise of preventing child porn. The privacy implications of this tool are staggering."
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Probably just for P2P (Score:5, Informative)
This will cause huge latency issues and cost beaucoup bandwidth. ISPs would be shooting themselves in the foot if they did this with all traffic. OTOH, I could see laws requiring such tools for P2P traffic -- in fact that may well be inevitable, with the **AA's "ruling class" status these days.
Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:5, Insightful)
This will cause huge latency issues and cost beaucoup bandwidth.
A soft touch with this would yield far better results depending on your intent. I would imagine an ISP that is sick and tired of certain traffics could utilize a system like this to start taking a closer look. Catch a few token users and then you have a excuse to throttle/monitor/block at will. I mean think of the children! What worries me is that with so many computers doing the bidding of people other than their owners, who knows what kind of traffic is being exchanged. Seems like an easy way for law enforcement to take a closer look at an individual... I've come across very questionable images via Google from rather inane, yet obscure, search queries. You could be one Russian rickroll away from the authorities and those around you having some nasty suspicions in their head.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:4, Insightful)
If my ISP told my opponent what porn i watch, they'd be sued. To the GROUND.
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Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:5, Funny)
but would he lose his erection?
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Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:5, Insightful)
Your ISP doesn't care about your stroke material.
This is all about P2P, the RIAA and collecting data for government and marketing purposes. Don't kid yourself that your ISP is so broken up about the possibility of sketchy porn traveling their network.
Just today I read an article quoting telecom execs about how SKYPE and other VOIP applications are going to make us less safe from terrorists. It's about profit and control, nothing more nothing less.
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Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:5, Funny)
"Well Mr. Smith's ISP reports he downloads copies of "Playboy's College Girls". Is this really the man you want to be your next state represenative???"
What, am I going to not vote for him because he watches boring porn?
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Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:5, Interesting)
One step further: make a file that has the same hash value of a "bad" file. This is trivial, especially if the file doesn't need to be valid for any application. If all that is checked is a hash of the traffic, then the actual contents of the file are meaningless.
So, this software will allow law enforcement to ruin your life (any implication crime involving sex and/or kids will do that, guilty or not), by simply seeing an unknown party send you a block of unintelligible data that happens to have the same hash as "pr0n." Great.
Anyone up for making an automated hash-spoofing packet forger? I'm sure something similar has already been done. With the speed of current connections, one could probably get the entire human race indicted for child pornography in under a week.
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Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:5, Insightful)
But if all they are doing is comparing hash files, couldn't you just as easily change the resolution of the file, or insert a couple different bits around to change the file slightly, which ends up with a completely different hash?
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Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:5, Insightful)
But if all they are doing is comparing hash files, couldn't you just as easily change the resolution of the file, or insert a couple different bits around to change the file slightly, which ends up with a completely different hash?
Yup. That, along with good encryption, means the bad guys get around this easily, while innocent bystanders are caught up by hash collisions.
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Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:4, Interesting)
Encrypted files on the peer-to-peer network could not be decrypted by CopyRouter, but the company claims it can fool the sender's computer into believing that the recipient was requesting an unencrypted and uncompressed file.
So basically what they do, is if your bittorrent client requests the files in encrypted format, they intercept that and instead request them unencrypted. They aren't decrypting the file, they are just asking for an unencrypted transmission of the file. If the file is in an encrypted zip file, then there is no way that they could see the actual files being transmitted.
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Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not hostile, much. As is common in our corporatocracy, here's a company that starts from the assumption that their customers are their enemy. So now we're going to pay our ISPs to "fool" our computers. Some "customer service" huh?
No thank you.
How about this: We pay you, and you give us bandwidth and stay the fuck out of our business. If we're using too much bandwidth, then spell it out in our contract and charge us more, so we can choose to give our business to someone else.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There are a ton of possibilities in doing this type of thing, and I don't know how this company's
Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:5, Insightful)
The makers of CopyRouter claim that it can even be used to defeat encryption and compression of files in the Internet's Wild West: the peer-to-peer file-sharing tools such as Gnutella and BitTorrent.
What are they going to do? Detect and Man in the Middle [wikipedia.org] every single connection attempt that goes through their router? The file sharing tools will simply upgrade to stronger encryption, such as AES [wikipedia.org], and harden the connection handshaking against MITM attacks (perhaps by introducing public key infrastructure with well known key server(s)). It was my understanding that the present crop of file sharing tools provide obfuscation (ROT13 and the like) and not real encryption to set the bar just high enough to prevent packet inspection. However, it would not be difficult to implement stronger encryption methods (if they haven't done so already), should that prove necessary. In fact, the CopyRouter folks are at a distinct disadvantage in any encryption arms race since MITM and other cryptanalysis techniques are much more computationally expensive than the encryption itself AND the users outnumber the routers by thousands or even tens of thousands to one. The NSA might more credibly claim to be able to do this, but they have acres of underground super computers consuming as much electrical power as a small country, so I am very skeptical when anyone claims to be able to "defeat encryption" and doubly so when a private company mentions it as a bullet point in their power point presentation. It is more likely that this is a private company trying to sell a pig in a poke to ISPs and governments who don't inspect the merchandise to carefully or don't know any better.
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Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:4, Insightful)
absolutely. U.S. ISPs continue to justify overselling while complaining about "power users" using too much bandwidth and overloading their network.
when will they realize that packet shaping and other intrusive network filtering/monitoring technologies such as this generate more overhead and are a waste of resources. instead of trying to manipulate/control subscribers, they should be upping bandwidth supply to meet the growing demand. then perhaps the U.S. wouldn't be left in the dust both in terms of average broadband speeds as well as cost of broadband.
you don't employ mandatory property searches to combat child pornography. not only would it be ineffectual, but even if it did it still wouldn't be worth the encroachment of our civil liberties. frankly, idiots who use the banner of fighting child pornography to pass stupid laws to destroy our democratic freedoms or strip away the rights of individuals are a much greater threat to society than someone who just downloads child pornography. those are the real sociopaths IMO.
if you want to protect children, give them free access to health care. give them free access to high education. create outreach programs to at-risk youth. employ social workers at school to watch for warning signs of abuse and provide counseling services at school for victimized children. narrow the disparity in education between the rich and poor so that poor children have equal opportunity to succeed in life.
you don't protect children by creating a fascist society around them.
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Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:4, Informative)
The parent is an example of typical slashdot idiocy. ISPs aren't common carriers. Though my karama will end up a smoking crater for breaking with the established GroupThink, so I'm making this post anonymously.
The immunity ISPs currently enjoy in the US come from various other safe harbor laws (i.e. Â230; DMCA). The constant slashdot drone of "ohhh.. ISPs can't suppress my free speech: common carrier common carrier!" is both entirely incorrect and dangerous, since it causes the geek squad to under-estimate the risks and the importance of things like net neutrality.
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Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet, for all your noise and handwaving - you fail to establish that an ISP isn't a common carrier.
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Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:5, Informative)
The AC is correct in what he is saying about common carriers. Check out the registered company name of your ISP and I will wager that it is not AT&T but rather a subsiduary of AT&T (ie: a seperate company in the eyes of the law).
This is how the telco's in Australia with common carrier status get around the rule against sniffing the line, eg: Australia's "Telstra" is not an ISP but "Telstra Big Pond" is an ISP. Since common carrier rules are international I dare say AT&T do exactly the same thing.
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Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:5, Insightful)
Best way to get anyone to get rid of something is to make them hate it. All my email blocked today? You bastards! Turn that thing off.
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Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:4, Informative)
Hash Values are useless anyway; change 1 pixel in an image and voila, new hash. They could use loose hashes as used for Spam-filtering, but the chances for collisions are higher.
The other issue is of course, it won't work on encrypted connections. It might not even work for obfuscated connections. AFAIK, Authorities are seriously shooting themselves in the foot using these techniques. They will only drive CP and others further underground, to a point that finding and prosecuting the bastards becomes too difficult and expensive.
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Re:Probably just for P2P (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think that this has anything to do with combating child pornography, then you are seriously naive.
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Starts with porn... (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
MPG? Have you been in a coma for the last eight years or so? I honestly haven't come across an MPEG file of a movie since the late 90's!
Re:Starts with porn... (Score:4, Informative)
You probably have, but they're usually encapsulated in a container format like AVI or MKV. :)
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Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
"The tool can 'check every file passing through an Internet provider's network -- every image, every movie, every document attached to an e-mail or found in a Web search -- to see if it matches a list of illegal images.' "
How exactly is this going to be accomplished? The equipment cost must be staggering and would consume allot of power. Way to conserve electricity, I thought we were trying to reduce the amount of power the Internet consumes. Does also this remove the common carrier status of ISP's?
I hope this never comes to fruition.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
TFA says they're going to use hash values. This will take a stateful packet inspection filter to catch, but the amount of state is only enough do the hash, and they can throw it away if it doesn't match anything on the blacklist.
While hashing seems easy enough to get around, I think the real thing they're looking for is a repeated pattern of someone sending blacklisted images. If you send/receive thousands of images, there's a good chance that you'll screw up and maybe a dozen of them won't get resampled (or use some other trick) to change the hash value. you'll pop up on a screen someplace, they'll get a search warrant, and you are busted.
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Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
Repeat after me: ISPs do not have common carrier status.
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Brilliant Digital Entertainment? (Score:4, Informative)
Wasn't that the Aussie spyware company attached to Sharman Networks/KaZaA?
Before it got raided, I mean?
I call shenanigans.
Re:Brilliant Digital Entertainment? (Score:4, Interesting)
I was about to bring up that point. KaZaA was linked to BDE (maybe a parent company or something). I'm not too sure of the exact relationship, but there definitely was one there.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't one of the defenses in the KaZaA court case the fact that they couldn't tell what files users were sharing, therefore they claim they weren't responsible for the distribution of copyrighted material? If this was the case, BDE's new "we can tell what you're sending/receiving" crap could land an A-Bomb worth of trouble in someone's lap.
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One question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:One question (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. They claim that the can search "every document attached to an e-mail .. -- to see if it matches a list of illegal images. Apparently, they have never heard of SMTP-TLS, POP3S, etc.. Or perhaps they have and they are just like many others -- selling snake oil.
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One answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Can it decrypt SSL/SSH in real time?
According to the article they use man-in-the-middle attacks. This is probably quite easy if the server is using self-signed certs.
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Re:One question (Score:5, Informative)
No. RTFA. CopyRouter merely pretends to be a server and tells the client the client to send data unencrypted. Bittorent just needs to upgrade it's encryption mechanisms.
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You know, it really makes me wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Won't work. (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, on really simple protocols, like HTTP or FTP, maybe - but most, if not all, p2p traffic is safe, i think. This is of course because of the chunky nature of transmission - you can't really tell what part of the file went through your pipe just by looking at it, and since parts are sent at random, you cannot rebuild the file with your chunks without guiding information, be it a torrent file, a list of parts for emule, or whatever else there is. And you need the whole file to get your hash-check. That's one. Two: encryption totally kills the effort, as the ISP can in no way examine your file without interfering with your transfer, and SSL exists solely to protect you from this.
Even if my line of thinking is really misguided here, this would require lots and lots of processing power - i mean, on a routing line with a hundred users on one end, it's thousands of hash-checks to be made for every stupid rebuilt file - both processes of course painfully CPU-eating, unless you want false-positives, since you didn't bother to use a proper hashing algorithm.
All in all, this looks to me like a terrible waste of money.
Re:Won't work. (Score:5, Interesting)
They claim they can scan Gnutella and BitTorrent.
Gnutella I don't know, but BitTorrent, almost certainly.
The common forms of BitTorrent encryption uses a "shared secret". The shared secret for BitTorrent is a 20-byte key known as the "infohash". This infohash is ALSO used as the unique hash to uniquely identify a given set of files. So its ALWAYS given to the tracker, and if the tracker isn't using SSL, that means its in the clear.
Making the encryption in BitTorrent almost laughably insecure. It's good enough to block non-stateful packet filters. It's not good enough to prevent people from listening in.
As for getting a file hash with BitTorrent, that's even easier.
It does it for them.
The ".torrent" file contains a list of hashes. They don't even need to look at the file contents.
I dunno about other P2P systems, but BitTorrent is definitely not safe from this.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, it gets worse than that. Say that I have an "illegal" image that I want to transmit to you. All I would have to do is embed it in a random frame of some 700 MB DivX movie. Then, not only do files have to be checked, but every frame of every video too.
And the age-old question of "is this MP3 file legal"? That is an example of an uncomputable question.
More likely, thi
Easily gotten around (Score:4, Insightful)
Time to make a utility that puts a file into an encrypted 7Zip archive, with the password stored in some reversable encryption method (encrypt the password with all zeroes as a key 1 million to 2 million times), so it would take x CPU seconds on some hardware to decrypt it.
This would allow files to still go across the net without requiring passwords or keys, but prevent utilities like this from just passively obtaining traffic, just due to the CPU cycles involved.
Of course, just stuffing a password in the comments field works too, but with a decent text parser, it can be extracted.
Its just more of the same cat and mouse game. The real crooks will not be affected while Joe ISP User will lose his privacy even more.
Evil (Score:5, Informative)
It looks like someone switched sides but taking a closer look they only seem to be in charge of the adware that came with Kazzaa, so I guess they were always evil.
Ways to abuse/defeat this... (Score:4, Insightful)
They're claiming they'll man-in-the-middle p2p users to disable encryption. Major problems there.
They're using a hash for the images/movies. Alter the image tags, or change a pixel, you've beat it. The more they ignore diffs, the more false positives they'll get.
There's my five seconds of thought on the efficacy/ethics of this. If you manage to solve all those problems, come back and I'll give it another five seconds. See you in ten years.
But hey, once it's in place they can use it for the *AA! Which is really what this is about, more free handouts to obsolete business models.
This is Fantastic (Score:4, Insightful)
A better use for this technology... (Score:4, Insightful)
Child porn is perfect for framing people (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with all the hysteria around child pornography is that it's too easy to frame someone. A little research, five minutes alone with your computer, and an anonymous phone call are all someone needs to ruin your life and reputation.
Let me be perfectly clear: Even if you're completely innocent, this is a serious threat to you. If someone decides to frame you, you won't be able to prove your innocence, and it won't matter even if you can. That's unacceptable. Yes, child porn is bad, but a society where anyone can anonymously destroy anyone else is much, much worse.
Big Daddy knows best (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what? In a dozen years of actively surfing porn, I've never encountered kiddie porn in the wild. This great big threat to all mankind so severe that we all need to put woolly pullovers over all our electronic gear and filter all telecommunications is simply and plainly crap. It's a ruse.
There are some people who want to control everyone else. They want to control what you see, what you hear, and as much as is humanly possible, what you think. They want to monitor us all (but not themselves, of course) and make us all cookie-cutter little clones who all think the same harmless little thoughts and are all scared of their authority.
F * U * C * K them.
Anyone telling you this sort of "protection" is necessary is deluded or a liar. Either way, such people should be ignored or in extreme cases, put somewhere they cannot bring harm to others.
The last page (4) of the article reveals the truth (Score:5, Insightful)
"...Internet service providers could easily be seen by the public as "overreaching," making it harder to get public support for efforts of law enforcement. What's needed, said the group's executive director, Grier Weeks, is for cops to investigate the leads they already have..."
and
"The Department of Justice and all 50 attorneys general are sitting on a mountain of evidence leading straight to the doors of child pornography traffickers," Weeks said. "We could rescue hundreds of thousands of child sexual assault victims tomorrow in America, without raising any constitutional issues whatsoever. But government simply won't spend the money to protect these children. Instead of arrests by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the child exploitation industry now faces Internet pop-ups from the Friendly Bus Investigators. That was always the fundamental difference between the Biden bill and the McCain bill. Biden wanted to fund cops to rescue children. McCain wanted to outsource the job."
This my friends is about the money! The U.S. Government and Brilliant Digital (ironic business name!) both know this won't work. Brilliant Digital see this as a market to exploit and make millions of dollars. The U.S. Government get a "cheap" way of "dealing" with child pornography and a perception from the general public as "something being done".
I'm sure the Government know about Brilliant Digital's dubious past but the percieved "benefits" are too good to miss.
It's a win-win for both parties!
I have children myself and I find developments like this horrifying.
Someone does not become a paedophile by looking at images on the internet, it's deeper and more complex then this - blocking content will not cure the problem or reduce related crimes in any way.
The last quoted paragraph sends chills down my spine and really makes me angry.
Children can be rescued if the funding is available but a company like Brilliant Digital will recieve the funding instead and the problem is never solved - people are made richer instead.
I really mean Think of the children
Re:useless (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:useless (Score:4, Informative)
Not only that, but it says that it works against movies.
The ISP downloads the entire 1-5GB file, hashes it, compares the hash, and then if it passes sends the file on to the user?
I think that would break almost every kind of application, and could easily be used to swamp the downstream of the ISP by making requests and then dropping the connection.
And then what about hash collisions, or programs that aren't web browsers?
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Corrupting the chinese (Score:4, Funny)
"but the side effect is that in a few years millions of Asians, who might otherwise have become normal, productive, law-abiding citizens of their respective countries, will instead have become deranged pedophiles."
Japan is proof the two aren't mutually exclusive.
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