Re: Last Call: <draft-farrell-perpass-attack-02.txt> (Pervasive Monitoring is an Attack) to Best Current Practice

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Replying to a bunch of things at once:

On 12/16/2013 06:48 PM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> Adding the sentence, "In addition, to qualify as pervasive monitoring,
> the activity should be either unknown to or unwelcome by the target of
> the monitor," would make the difference explicit.

I disagree. Even if X% of people agreed or approved or authorized
the attack, it would still be an attack. While one might have an
argument if X approximated 100, that's just not the case. And user
consent is a huge rathole that's not meaningful for most protocol
design activities, so I also disagree with including variants of
Andrew's suggestion, as well as disagreeing with the statement.


On 12/16/2013 04:36 PM, Sam Hartman wrote:
> Listening to the discussion between Stephen Farrell and Stephen Kent,
> I've realized that I do not believe the the current draft clearly
> indicates that the big change here is that we need to consider what
> happens when monitoring happens along many paths or kat multiple points
> along a path.  I believe that Stephen Farrell clearly explained the
> difference and change to Stephen Kent.  I agree with that explanation
> and believe the draft would be improved by clearly capturing that.

Slippery-slope alert! I don't disagree with the basic point, but
if we start to characterise the details of the attack then we are
heading down a rathole. That is a rathole we probably need to
enter when we try document the threat model, but that is planned
to be and should be a different document. So please let's try
to include as few words here as are needed and no more. I don't
think we need this addition, even though I agree with the
statement, but not all true statements are needed for the BCP
to be correct. And fewer will make it more effective.


On 12/16/2013 07:47 PM, Stephen Kent wrote:
> Your parenthetical comment admits the probability is not approaching 1,
> for all users on all links, ... This may be a reason why we don't have a
> rigorous definition for pervasive monitoring yet.

I assert we have a sufficient definition for this BCP and do
not here need more. Can you say what ambiguity in interpretation
would be caused by the current definition? I don't think any of
us interested in aimless perfection, but if there are ambiguities
that'd have an impact, then those would be very interesting.
If there are no such ambiguities, then we should be done.

Other points from recent mails:

- RFC4949 is already referenced - are we all reading the draft?
- Artefact is correct. [1]

*Please* let's avoid ratholes, I'd ask that everyone think
whether or not any well-meaning suggestion is one or not
before suggesting stuff.

Cheers,
S.


[1] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/artefact?q=artefact










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