Jacob Appelbaum at a fund-raiser. Photo by Scott Beale.
That's the question I have when I see a geek conference coming up in Germany, and note that three Navy officials who are long-time developers of Tor, the encryption software. As we know, Tor got its start in the US military, like the Internet itself did in DARPA, but there's a particularly nihilist geeky notion behind Tor about using innocent human shields and cultivating indifference to criminality -- a flaw to which both military and anarchists are vulnerable -- that have made me critical of Tor. (Here's what I wrote in April 2012 about the Navy, Tor and Appelbaum long before Snowden.)
The 20th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security will take place in Berlin from November 4-8 -- be there, if you have a thousand plus dollars for the entry fee.
The conference brings together information security researchers, practitioners, developers, and users from all over the world to explore cutting-edge ideas and results. It provides an environment to conduct intellectual discussions. From its inception, CCS has established itself as a high standard research conference in its area.
No doubt!
And one of the cutting-edge ideas the conference-goers will hear is that roughly 100% of Tor's users in a single location basically yield up their anonymity within 3 months to adversaries.
So in the interests of public safety, it's probably better that this important news get to the community of geeks most likely to get maximum use of it -- those helping others to use Tor -- than not. And "because -- science."
Even so, I think the Obama Administration has to think more coherently about why they are allowing Tor constantly to run out ahead of them so destructively, and what it means for the military to appear on the same platform -- the same venue, the same conference even if not literally the same panel discussion -- and mingle in the same crowd as a helper of Edward Snowden (and there will undoubtedly be many more helpers and enablers of Snowden in the German audience).
I'm not sure of the politics and procedures for how the inequities and bad faith involved in "normalizing" Appelbaum get raised in this case -- but maybe somebody should have a talk with Martin Shallbruch, depending on where his sympathies lie, as I shall explain...
Why should Appelbaum, funded by the US government, developing for Tor, which is still 60% funded by the Department of Defense, be a problem for the original Tor developers from the Navy in terms of conference appearances?
Because Appelbaum as readers of this blog know is not only involved in WikiLeaks and is under investigation by the WikiLeaks grand jury in the US, he was intimately involved in the Snowden defection from the NSA and helped with encryption of his communications. Appelbaum has joined with Snowden, under cover of the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, to cause enormous and irreparable harm to the United States government and people. Hello!
Oh, I realize these Navy geeks can't possibly see it this way "because -- science." The nerd tribe cuts right across institutional boundaries and imperatives, whether of the military's discipline and ranks or the horrid hazing rituals of anarchist coders, and one thing that either group insists on is code trumping all -- code-as-law -- as "objective" and "the truth".
If you criticize anything morally wrong about Tor and its uses and misuses, and the huge collection of unsavoury characters and despicable doings that have sprung up about Tor, you are told blandly that it's just software that like a hammer to a nail has no moral inherency.
I always point out that Tor has brought us the two defining disasters of our nation's foreign policy and intelligence security in our time -- WikiLeaks and Snowden -- and it needs to be taken down and they need to start over. Tor isn't just software; it's a community of practice, a network of people, some of them very ill-intentioned to the US.
But those engrossed in Tor and the nerdy ethics-free approach to software and its cults that always invade every discussion about it think it's "just software" or "the good outweighs the bad".
That's why you get what I view as an entirely false narrative first from Greenwald in the Guardian, then from Shane Harris and John Hudson in Foreign Policy that pits the NSA against the State Department, bad spy guys invading privacy versus good activists and freedom-fighters protecting privacy.
That along the way you have not only child pornographers and drug dealers -- which is bad enough! -- doesn't bother them terribly, much less radical anarchists like Assange who want to destroy the US government, civic institutions and even the Internet itself as we know it (they hate businesses and multistakeholders with power other than themselves). And THAT is something that the Navy -- which is supposed to protect our seas and I guess by metaphorical extension our Internet waves from hostile forces -- really should get more serious about understanding.
Usually, what's been happening with these nerd conferences like DEFCON since Snowden is that the nerds themselves posture and swagger and tell General Alexander and other NSA ilk to stay out because now they're compromised and they've "broken trust". That hackers like Snowden and Appelbaum have first broken trust is of no matter to these arrogant types; they need to show their "independence."
But the conference in Berlin apparently isn't so allergic to the US government that it won't feature the Navy on the agenda:
Users Get Routed: Traffic Correlation on Tor by Realistic Adversaries
Aaron Johnson (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory), Chris Wacek (Georgetown University), Rob Jansen (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory), Micah Sherr (Georgetown University), Paul Syverson (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory)
Oh, and US Big IT corporations such as SAP, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Google, IBM Research etc. are the contributing sponsors for this event. German academic geekdom is never too proud to take money from US corporations that are whipped in Der Spiegel for being handmaidens (whores) of the NSA.
Oh, and Army Research Office - although the logo produced on the website from this institution is so blurry that unless you already knew it or verified it in Google images, you might not notice it -- it's reminiscent of the Lavabit owner who turned over numerous pages of bits in 4-pt type to frustrate the FBI...
The keynote speakers featured are Martin Schallbruch Chief Information Officer at the Federal Ministry of the Interior (Germany) -- and perhaps someone can explain to me what his politics are, I suspect they are probably leftist like most geeks; the famous Mikko Hypponen Chief Research Officer of F-Secure (Finland) and Prof. Ravi Sandhu Executive Director of the Institute for Cyber Security at the University of Texas at San Antonio (USA) -- another rock star in his field.
BTW, to get a sense of Mikko's influence and reach -- one RT of a post I did on Snowden's online footprint by him on Twitter brought thousands of viewers to my blog instantly.
"Invited" speaker for this conference -- which doesn't come cheap as even the student fee is around 750 euros going up to 990 euros for the earlybird non-member -- is Jacob Appelbaum. Jake hasn't gotten his homework done yet, so you don't see his paper posted yet, but here's the abstract:
The recent leaks of information by Edward Snowden teach us about the behaviors, specific goals, various techniques, as well as the overall motivations behind certain well funded attackers. The information presented by journalists raise extremely serious questions about the trade-offs being made by these attackers. The subverting of academics, industry and scientific standardization bodies is not only concerning, it threatens to undermine analysis performed on the basis of certain ground truths. How does this impact society? How does it impact industry? What empowers these attackers and how is it that it does not empower other attackers? What problems and threat models need to be considered? What are the key problems that we must consider with regard to security, privacy, anonymity and society?
Translation -- he doesn't mean Snowden is the attacker, although apparently through the kind ministrations of John Perry Barlow and the Fund for Free Press, he is likely well-funded, too. No, he means the NSA as attacker on all of the crypto kids. BTW, the "subversion of standards" hasn't been proven by a long shot.
Note the assistance in the mythmaking of "hacker-as-journalist" in the bio -- "Jacob Appelbaum works as a journalist, a photographer, and as a software developer and researcher with The Tor Project" -- and indulges his interests in things like "consensus-based government" -- a horrid little sect growing out of the open software cult which I'm reminded I need to write about separately as it, too, is escaping from its lab to harm the general public.
But let's look at what this paper that our brave Navy researchers in blue are bringing to the table, because it's interesting.
It also goes quite far to debunk a narrative that Greenwald is now crafting, and which I see the Foreign Policy writers Shane and Hudson have unfortunately picked up, which is that Tor is unbeatable by NSA hackers. Nonsense.
As I've blogged before, Paul Syverson is at the Center for High Assurance Computer Systems
US Naval Research Laboratory. A past paper Practical Vulnerabilities of the Tor Anonymity Network lets us know that Tor isn't so unbeatable -- hostile forces can just watch the nodes and what packets enter and exit and get at the content of your communications.
Indeed, that's what their friend Julian Assange did and that's how he got his sordid start as a hacker pretending to be a publisher -- sniffing other people's packets and grabbing other people's stuff to make his WikiLeaks stash.
In the precis of the paper to be given next month, the authors write:
Onion routing is a technology designed at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to protect the security and privacy of network communications. In particular, Tor, the current widely-used onion routing system, was originally designed to protect intelligence gathering from open sources and to otherwise protect military communicatoins over insecure or public networks, but it is also used by human rights workers, law enforcement offiers, abuse victims, ordinary citizens, corporations, journalists, and others.
The paper then goes on to say that "what Tor currently does for its various users and more on what it does not do".
Grandly, the Navy men tell us: "We have designed and built the Tor anonymous network to secure cyberspace and empower cybercitizens."
Beware of people who tell you that they are "empowering" you. Indeed, I despise the very notion of "empowering" -- often used especially about women and minorities by various institutions and usually by men. Anybody who tells you that they are "empowering" you in fact is retaining power that they are giving out to you on sufferance -- and they could retract it at any time. Notice they aren't saying "share power with cybercitizens" or "recognizing the inherent power that cybercitizens have and our conditionality as government employees on that power" but "empowering" that they dispense -- with budgets -- on a whim.
The essentially nihilist and cynical theory at the center of Tor -- that authors actually do us a favour by telling us there is "effectively nothing at the center" of Tor -- is this: anonymity as a tactic for movements good and bad alike is whitewashed by saying law-enforcement itself needs unmarked cars, plainclothesmen, etc. to function again crime.
This strikes me as fundamentally bad faith. The law-enforcer undertakes his mission in his unmarked car with supervisors, rules, oversight -- law. If he uses his unmarked car to do bad things, I as a citizen have all sorts of ways of controlling him with lawsuits, civilian review boards, the media, the ACLU. Not so the citizen in the unmarked car over whom I have no control except by law-enforcers -- who themselves are now undermined by those unmarked crypto kids insisting on absolute encryption. No thank you.
As the Navy guys say about Tor, "this only works because all other cars are also unmarked," i.e. ordinary civilian cars are not marked with police insignia. And this is what I mean by the taking of human shields that Tor engages in -- it's a theory that relies on grabbing as hostage people who are innocent, unmarked, going about their business, and exploiting their normal stripes to hide the zebra, who sometimes is just a zebra but sometimes is is a horse in pajamas and sometimes a jailbird.
The paper talks of "thousands" of relays and we never hear how many nodes there are in Tor exactly -- it is estimated as having gone from 33 to 2000 to even double that, i.e. 4000, but the FBI took down "half" in the child pornography ring bust in Ireland -- and we can imagine seized more with the Silk Road bust. Tor may be in tatters, even with its "400,000 users".
But it gets worse, so pay attention:
In this paper, Syverson et all explain the vulnerability to Tor:
If an adversary can see both ends of a Tor circuit, he can trivially correlate who is talking to whom over that circut. This is thus generally known as an end-to-end correlation attack.
Through various tactics -- tagging bits, delaying bits -- the adversaries can follow what's happening in the system.
Debate on Tor is inhibited by the Torians themselves imagining that only technologists are allowed to talk about it or can even understand it -- and they like keeping it that way because they can gain more impunity.
But it really is not that big a deal. The Navy people aren't crack leet coders, but mathematicians who don't even program. This is about game theory and analyzing predictability and exploitation of rules in systems. Example: if law enforcement can watch criminals, or seed the system with groups of themselves so they can follow the behaviour of one group of anonymous people very reliably, well, so can criminals especially those with botnets and of course nation states with hostile intents and the resources of a state
"Fortunately Tor is good enough for many of us," concludes Syverson in that paper.
But now take a look at what he and his comrades are presenting in Berlin with new research.
Our results show that Tor users are far more susceptible to compromise than indicated by prior work.
Tor is known to be insecure against an adversary that can observe a user’s traffic entering and exiting the anonymity network.
Our analysis shows that 80% of all types of users may be de-anonymized by a relatively moderate Tor-relay adversary within six months. Our results also show that against a single AS adversary roughly 100% of users in some common locations are deanonymized within three months (95% in three months for a single IXP)
Note again what a shift from past research with Roger Dingeldine, who left the Navy and now hangs out at the Chaos Computer Club and other geek watering holes on panels with Appelbaum. Back in 2004, Feamster and Dingeldine wrote that the "probability that a single AS could observe both sides of the connection was over 50%. The man overall probability was about 38%."
Now it's "roughly 100%" in one location, i.e. in a place like China or Iran or Russia where the state is really motivated to watch you, or hey, in the US.
Uh-oh.
BTW, as they explain:
The Internet is composed of thousands of independent networks of arious sizes called Autonomous systems. (ASes). As traffic moves between a Tor client and a relay in the Tor network, it typically traverses multiple ASers. We have known for years that if the same AS appears on the path from the client to the anonymity network and from the anonymity network to the client's destination, such as a website, then an observer located at that AS can preform a correlation attack to identity the client and her destination. So it is possible to do a correlation attack from one location rathan than requiring two.
I would think that this would be the cue to pull the budgets, roll up the networks, and do an after-action study of why this horrid mess not only harmed our country with WikiLeaks and Snowden, but harmed many individuals with child pornography and drugs, and let a bunch of swaggering geeks pretend that they could justify all this and their own sabotage by the fact that a few Iranians or Chinese dissidents got to evade their government's hammerlock over the Internet. I'm sorry, the trade-off just wasn't worth it -- and we as a nation never got to debate this in Congress.
Internet Freedom hearings have never really debated the ideology and methodology and even the efficacy of circumvention and encryption in the struggle for democracy and is not likely to do so given the liberal media narrative still celebrating this as an achievement of the Obama Administration. I support the Administration's Internet Freedoms overall -- unlike Evgeny Morozov -- but I think they need more debate and scrutiny and actually more resources.
The conference is filled with exotic nerd stuff like "Relational Abstract Interpretation for the Verification of 2-Hypersafety Properties" which are probably room-clearers even for some of the geeks that come to these things who are, um, "largely self-taught" like Appelbaum.
But there are important philosophical debates to be had with talks such as that by Felix "FX" Lindner, Resistance is Not Futile – Fighting Nation-State Actors and the Borg as the geeks particularly at the Chaos Computer Club arm themselves for further struggle against their favourite enemy, the US.
Recent Comments