Pervasive Monitoring is an Attack
draft-farrell-perpass-attack-02
The information below is for an old version of the document.
| Document | Type | Active Internet-Draft (individual in gen area) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Authors | Stephen Farrell , Hannes Tschofenig | ||
| Last updated | 2013-12-12 (Latest revision 2013-12-03) | ||
| Stream | Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) | ||
| Formats | plain text xml htmlized pdfized bibtex | ||
| Reviews |
OPSDIR Last Call review
(of
-03)
Has Issues
GENART Last Call review
(of
-03)
Ready with Nits
SECDIR Last Call review
Ready
|
||
| Stream | WG state | Submitted to IESG for Publication | |
| Document shepherd | Sean Turner | ||
| IESG | IESG state | In Last Call (ends 2013-12-31) | |
| Consensus boilerplate | Unknown | ||
| Telechat date | (None) | ||
| Responsible AD | Jari Arkko | ||
| Send notices to | stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie, Hannes.Tschofenig@gmx.net, draft-farrell-perpass-attack@tools.ietf.org | ||
| IANA | IANA review state | IANA OK - No Actions Needed |
draft-farrell-perpass-attack-02
Network Working Group S. Farrell
Internet-Draft Trinity College Dublin
Intended status: BCP H. Tschofenig
Expires: June 6, 2014 December 3, 2013
Pervasive Monitoring is an Attack
draft-farrell-perpass-attack-02.txt
Abstract
The IETF has consensus that pervasive monitoring is a technical
attack that should be mitigated in the design of IETF protocols,
where possible.
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on June 6, 2014.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2013 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
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the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
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1. It's an Attack
[[Note (to be removed before publication): This draft is written as
if IETF consensus has been established for the text.]]
The technical plenary of IETF 88 [IETF88Plenary] discussed pervasive
monitoring. Such pervasive surveillance requires the monitoring
party to take actions that are indistinguishable from an attack on
Internet communications. Participants at that meeting therefore
expressed strong agreement that this was an attack that should be
mitigated where possible via the design of protocols that make
pervasive monitoring significantly more expensive or infeasible.
This Best Current Practice (BCP) formally documents that consensus,
having been through an IETF last call.
For the purposes of this BCP "pervasive monitoring" means very
widespread privacy-invasive gathering of protocol artefacts including
application content, protocol meta-data (such as headers) or keys
used to secure protocols. Other forms of traffic analysis, for
example, correlation, timing or measuring packet sizes can also be
used for pervasive monitoring.
The term "attack" is used here in a technical sense that differs
somewhat from common English usage. In common English usage, an
"attack" is an aggressive action perpetrated by an opponent, intended
to enforce the opponent's will on the attacked party. In the
Internet, the term is used to refer to a behavior that subverts the
intent of a communicator without the agreement of the parties to the
communication. It may change the content of the communication,
record the content of the communication, or through correlation with
other communication events or attempts, reveal information the
communicator did not intend to be revealed. It may also have other
effects that similarly subvert the intent of a communicator.
[RFC4949] contains a more complete definition for the term "attack"
as used here. We also use the term in the singular here, even though
pervasive monitoring in reality may require a multi-faceted set of
coordinated attacks.
In particular, the term "attack", when used technically, implies
nothing about the motivation of the actor mounting the attack. The
motivation behind pervasive monitoring is not relevant for this
document, but can range from non-targeted nation-state surveillance,
to legal but privacy-unfriendly purposes by commercial enterprises,
to illegal purposes by criminals. The same techniques can be used
regardless of motivation and we cannot defend against the most
nefarious actors while allowing monitoring by other actors no matter
how benevolent some might consider them to be. As technology
advances, techniques that were once only available to extremely well
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funded actors become more widely accessible. Mitigating this attack
is therefore a protection against wider usage of pervasive
monitoring.
2. And We Will Continue to Mitigate the Attack
The IETF also has consensus to, where possible, work to mitigate the
technical parts of the pervasive monitoring attack, in just the same
way as we continually do for these and any other protocol
vulnerability.
There are various ways in which IETF protocols can be designed in
order to mitigate pervasive monitoring, but those will change over
time as mitigation and attack techniques develop and so are not
described here. This BCP simply records the consensus to design
protocols so as to mitigate the attack, where possible.
More limited-scope monitoring to assist with network management that
is required in order to operate the network or an application is not
considered pervasive monitoring. There is though a clear potential
for such limited monitoring mechanisms to be abused as part of
pervasive monitoring, so this tension needs careful consideration in
protocol design. Making networks unmanageable in order to mitigate
pervasive monitoring would not be an acceptable outcome. But
equally, ignoring pervasive monitoring in designing network
management mechanisms would go against the consensus documented in
this BCP. An appropriate balance will likely emerge over time as
real instances of this tension are considered.
It is also important to note that the term "mitigation" is a
technical term that does not necessarily imply an ability to
completely prevent or thwart an attack. As in common English usage,
this term is used here in the sense of "make less severe, serious, or
painful." [OED] In this case, designing IETF protocols to mitigate
pervasive monitoring will almost certainly not completely prevent
such from happening, but can significantly increase the cost of such
monitoring or force what was covert monitoring to be more overt or
more likely to be detected (possibly later) via other means. And
even where the IETF has done this work well and that has been fully
deployed, there will still be some privacy-relevant information that
will inevitably be disclosed by protocols.
While RFC 4949 does not contain a definition for the term mitigation,
we prefer it here to the term countermeasure which is defined in RFC
4949 since the latter term is more often understood to mean putting
in place a more fully effective mitigation of an attack.
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Finally, we note that the IETF is not equipped to tackle the non-
technical aspects of mitigating pervasive surveillance. Others need
to step forward to tackle those if pervasive monitoring is to be
fully addressed.
3. Process Note
In the past, architectural statements of this sort, e.g., [RFC1984]
and [RFC2804] have been published as joint products of the IESG and
IAB. However, since those documents were published, the IETF and IAB
have separated their publication "streams" as described in [RFC4844]
and [RFC5741]. This document was initiated by both the IESG and IAB,
but it is published as an IETF-stream consensus document, having
garnered the consensus of the IETF as approved by the IESG.
4. Security Considerations
This BCP is entirely about privacy. More information about the
relationship between security and privacy threats can be found in
[RFC6973]. Section 5.1.1 of [RFC6973] specifically addresses
surveillance as a combined security-privacy threat.
5. IANA Considerations
There are none. We hope the RFC editor deletes this section before
publication.
6. Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the participants of the IETF 88 technical
plenary for their feedback. Thanks in particular to the following
for useful suggestions that resulted in changes to this text: Jari
Arkko, Fred Baker, Marc Blanchet, Brian Carpenter, Benoit Claise,
Spencer Dawkins, Adrian Farrel, Russ Housley, Joel Jaeggli, Eliot
Lear, Barry Leiba, Ted Lemon, Erik Nordmark, Pete Resnick, Peter
Saint-Andre, and Sean Turner. Additionally, we would like to thank
all those who contributed suggestions on how to improve Internet
security and privacy or who commented on this on various IETF mailing
lists, such as the ietf@ietf.org and the perpass@ietf.org lists.
7. Informative References
[IETF88Plenary]
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IETF, "IETF 88 Plenary Meeting Materials", URL:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/88/materials.html,
Nov 2013.
[OED] Stevenson, Angus, "Oxford Dictionary of English", Oxford
University Press http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/
definition/english/mitigate, 2010.
[RFC1984] IAB, IESG, Carpenter, B., and F. Baker, "IAB and IESG
Statement on Cryptographic Technology and the Internet",
RFC 1984, August 1996.
[RFC2804] IAB and IESG, "IETF Policy on Wiretapping", RFC 2804,
May 2000.
[RFC4844] Daigle, L. and Internet Architecture Board, "The RFC
Series and RFC Editor", RFC 4844, July 2007.
[RFC4949] Shirey, R., "Internet Security Glossary, Version 2",
RFC 4949, August 2007.
[RFC5741] Daigle, L., Kolkman, O., and IAB, "RFC Streams, Headers,
and Boilerplates", RFC 5741, December 2009.
[RFC6973] Cooper, A., Tschofenig, H., Aboba, B., Peterson, J.,
Morris, J., Hansen, M., and R. Smith, "Privacy
Considerations for Internet Protocols", RFC 6973,
July 2013.
Authors' Addresses
Stephen Farrell
Trinity College Dublin
Dublin, 2
Ireland
Phone: +353-1-896-2354
Email: stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie
Hannes Tschofenig
Brussels,
Belgium
Phone:
Email: hannes.tschofenig@gmx.net
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