NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: Proposals for mass Internet monitoring and P2P disruptions
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In message <20081208214503.ED3ACFD626@willers.employees.org>, Cliff
Sojourner <cls@employees.org> writes
>very interesting... but I call BS on this:
Perhaps wisely. I believe this is the latest incarnation of the Global
File Registry
http://www.globalfileregistry.com/
which dates back some time -- and which doesn't appear to have been
taken up as a solution to unauthorised sharing of copyrighted music and
films. It has recently reinterpreted itself as a way of tracking child
sexual abuse images (as in the URL quoted earlier):
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27198621
>> 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. The slide show calls this "special handling." This is done
>by changing the
>> underlying protocol settings that establish how the sender and recipient
>exchange the file.
from their documentation, their scheme only appears to work with
Gnutella (viz not with BitTorrent). This makes it of limited relevance
these days
>> This trickery, unknown to either the sender or recipient, would make it
>possible for CopyRouter
>> to see the underlying files, calculate a hash value and compare the files to
>the list of
>> illegal files, Brilliant Digital says.
>
>wow, they have a man-in-the-middle attack, previously unknown? that's amazing.
>I wonder what Bruce Schneier would have to say about that.
Gnutella doesn't have any MitM protection, so I think such an attack may
work in the short term (you need some sort of end point certification to
be able to detect a man-in-the-middle, and file sharing systems don't
usually sit within a PKI). Some of the BitTorrent encryption claims to
have some MITM detection (in that it considers the infohash of the
Torrent) however, I've never looked at the detail -- and I rather
suspect that by messing around with (and snooping upon) traffic earlier
on it would be insecure :( That said, this is all fixable by competent
protocol designers if enough blocking systems get deployed to make it
worthwhile.
- --
Dr Richard Clayton <richard.clayton@cl.cam.ac.uk>
tel: 01223 763570, mobile: 07887 794090
Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, CB3 0FD
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