Traffic peeking
draft-moonesamy-traffic-peeking-00

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INTERNET-DRAFT                                              S. Moonesamy
Intended Status: Informational                                          
Expires: May 28, 2014                                  November 24, 2013

                            Traffic peeking 
                   draft-moonesamy-traffic-peeking-00

Abstract

   In June 2013, a news article revealed that the National Security
   Agency obtained direct access to the systems of several service
   providers from the United States through an undisclosed surveillance
   programme called PRISM.  This document discusses about traffic
   peeking.

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
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Copyright and License 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
 

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   publication of this document. Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
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   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
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Table of Contents

   1. Background  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   2. Traffic peeking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
     2.1. Encrypting traffic  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   3. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   4. Conclusion  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   6. References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
     6.1.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   Appendix A: IETF Protocols without encryption  . . . . . . . . . .  5
   Author's Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6

 

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INTERNET DRAFT              Traffic peeking            November 24, 2013

1. Background

   In June 2013, a news article [Guar1] revealed that the National
   Security Agency obtained direct access to the systems of several
   service providers from the United States through an undisclosed
   surveillance programme called PRISM [Guar2].  The surveillance
   programme intercepted traffic flowing through communication links
   used throughout the world.  According to a news article published in
   October 2013, the National Security Agency had also been wiretapping
   traffic flowing between the datacenters used by Google and Yahoo
   [Wash1].

   In 2007, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson discussed about the
   possibility of a backdoor in a Dual Elliptic Curve  pseudorandom
   number generator [Rump]. In September, 2013, the National Institute
   of Standards and Technology reported that concern has been expressed
   about the Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generation
   (Dual_EC_DRBG) algorithm published in one of its standards (SP 800-
   90/90A) [NIST]. 

2. Traffic peeking

   RFC 1958 [RFC1958] states that "it is highly desirable that Internet
   carriers protect the privacy and authenticity of all traffic, but
   this is not a requirement of the architecture.  "Tussle in
   Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow's Internet" [Tussle] states that
   "peeking is irresistible".  Given that most Internet traffic is not
   encrypted, there isn't any significant barrier to hamper an entity
   with the available resources to peek on the traffic of Internet
   carriers.  As data storage is affordable the next step would be to go
   beyond traffic peeking and collect all the data.  [Tussle] argued