[ NNSquad ] Re: Speculation, how AT&T can implement "copyright filtering" without wiretapping/dpi...

[Richard Bennett <richard@bennett.com>]

I presented this technique at the NN2008 symposium yesterday. I showed a 
screen-grab from Mininova showing pirated Microsoft
Office, and the peer list from an Azureus leecher. It's pretty easy to 
connect the dots from Microsoft's monitoring of the tracker to action by 
an ISP in response to electronic requests from the copyright owner. One 
technique that comes to mind for stoppng piracy transactions is Reset 
Spoofing, of course.

I showed the technique to clarify that enforcement of copyright doesn't 
involve Deep Packet Inspection or anything that scary.

Is there any reason that such an automated system should not be used, or 
does Net Neutrality now connote a license to steal?

RB

Nick Weaver wrote:
> I've done some speculation on how AT&T might actually implement their
> proposed copyright-filtering mechanism, without actually having to do
> deep-packet inspection or even providing new hardware. After all, if
> their motive is to save money, they will select a mechanism which
> doesn't cost money.
>
> The idea is to rely on someone else (MPAA or an affiliate) to spider
> the torrents and identify participants, and once the graph of
> participants is generated, to dynamically block just that graph using
> router ACLs, which would allow the MPAA to play Whak-a-mole on
> individual torrents.  This would be very different in practice
> compared with either deep packet inspection or traffic analysis.
>
> I think such speculation is useful because if AT&T really does follow
> through on their stated goals, we should get ahead of the curve and
> understand what this might look like in practice, and how to detect
> the difference between possible techniques (DPI vs generic traffic
> analysis vs spider-blocking).
>
> The solution space is actually pretty limited.
>
> More details/thoughts on my blog:
> http://nweaver.blogspot.com/2008/01/security-thought-at-copyright-fighting.html
>