On Mar 11, 2011, at 7:13 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote: >> >> You mean some third-world (or soon to be) junta-dictator might officially and deliberately cut their economy off from the world's communication networks, thereby insuring economic failure, rather than suffer the risk that their citizens might be exposed to external influence or use the Internet to complain about or conspire against their "lawful leaders", rather as North Korea has done? >> >> I'm OK with that. It helps bring about their failure due to economic collapse rather than requiring outside force to stop their depredations, although it might take a few generations to work. > > ... compared to the much faster social changes that have been witnessed in places where there's been even partial exposure to external information, that seems like a poor outcome. Collapse is messy and very dangerous for the people you want to help. > How likely are people in even the most restrictive regime to not have even partial exposure to outside information, no matter whether IETF protocol specifications have richer security considerations than we currently practice? > >> I'm also okay with air-dropping satellite terminals and television receivers to their victims, and with beaming high-power wireless signals across their borders in order to speed things up. > > And how likely are those things to actually happen and have a measurable effect? Seriously. Ever heard of the Voice of America program? Most developed nations have something similar. Did you see all the satellite dishes on the walls of houses in Cairo? Now, this does raise an entirely different question more related to parallel efforts to make self-organizing ad-hoc networks useful. This is a really good effort, useful in everything from economic growth efforts like OLPC to recovering from a Japan-earthquake-style major disaster. We should probably be working on this sort of thing harder than we presently are. > > I have severe doubts about whether this is an appropriate and capable forum for making such weighty judgements. YMMV. > Well, we certainly shouldn't be trying to decide which nations thrive and which collapse. But we ARE responsible for the security characteristics of our own protocols. We're quite willing to talk about security, and make protocol specifiers jump through intricate and mostly useless hoops in their spec writing, but we don't seem to be willing to put our "money where our mouth is." For example, why are we still running our web sites on HTTP instead of HTTPS? If we only had the latter, it becomes much more difficult for MITMs to know whether a person communicating with the IETF web site is participating in the IETF process or just using us as a web proxy to talk to Facebook about The Revolution. If all traffic is encrypted, and if the apparent endpoint might or might not be a relay instead of the actual endpoint, then it's a whole lot harder for the MITM to separate wheat from chaff. Many of our protocols support this sort of obscuring, but our practice has been to disable the functionality through implementation choices. On a related note, we've developed what we think is a secured mail protocol suite. Yet we don't use it, instead subjecting our list members (and more so the administrators) to having to deal with an endless barrage of spam. We probably don't use our secured mail protocol because it is too cumbersome. Maybe that should be a wake-up call for us to develop a better way to secure mail. But instead of doing practical things that actually impact security, we endlessly debate things like the distribution-reuse flags for geolocation objects (which will be generally ignored by implementors) and write specifications like the Consent Framework for SIP that will most likely never be implemented. Most critically, we've recognized that Internet users may have needs for privacy (which until recently has meant just encryption of data) and integrity (minimally, signing of data). It's time we recognize another fundamental principle: obscurity (hidden purpose of data). And having recognized these principles, we need to start taking much more aggressive steps in protocol design to assure that they are actually being met in a useful way. We can start by: 1) deprecating the non-secured variant of every core protocol that has both secure and non-secure variants 2) not writing any more protocols with secured and non-secured variants 3) analyzing existing protocols that are fundamentally non-secured and determine which, if any, security enhancements should be made normative 4) Doing a much better job of really analyzing the security considerations of new work, taking fully into account the principles of privacy, integrity, and obscurity. Keep in mind that every protocol has the "good citizenship" responsibility not just of addressing these principles itself, but of also helping its fellow citizens meet them. 5) Incorporating the principles of Privacy, Integrity, and Obscurity directly into our core mission statement, into the very fabric of our belief system, just as "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" became the driving motto of the Third Republic of France, ending much of the abuse of Privilege that preceded the revolution. -- Dean Willis _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf