Subject: [Raven] Fly away, raven

From: Grenville Armitage <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 00:50:29 -0700

So, when is this list being shut down?

It seems everyone's having a merry little party. But mostly
we're ignoring what, to me, appears to be the Key Question:

	- What should the IESG do when approached to support work
	  efforts leading to tappable protocols?

Now, only the naieve believe raw packet traces cannot already
be obtained. Let's just accept that and move back to the more
interesting Key Question.

Clearly we also can argue the merits of various encryption schemes,
whether it is better for end users to employ their own, and
whether operators who supply encryption on behalf of their
users can simply turn off encryption (or break it) to create
a 'tap'. But that discussion again ignores the Key Question.

In addition, the absence of a clear _legal_ requirement on the IETF
is somewhat irrelevant too. It was earlier noted (and apparently
missed by the people who argue law on the net) that:

	"The IETF works on whatever its membership is interested in"

Now, the "membership" includes engineers of vendors who believe
themselves subject to the interests of various regional governments
(regardless of whether, in any given case, a legal requirement actually
exists). There's nothing that chest-thumping on this list can do to
stop requests being made of the IESG for new work efforts directed at
wiretapping. Back to the Key Question above.

Then there's the entire notion of a wiretap itself. Again, there's
a quaint but scary lack of understanding that a wiretap is simply
an anonymous (N+1)th party to a logical multiparty call. Viewed
that way, IP Multicast and Multiparty call control protocols
currently under development actually support 'wiretaps' by default.
Indulging the present anti-spook sentiment would actually require
the IESG to actively force relevant WGs to produce secure (for
some definition of the word) membership controls. (Probably a
partial answer to the Key Question.)

But what to do? Sure, the IESG could say "sod off!" to anyone
asking for wiretapping facilities - but how to tell the
difference between a protocol for wiretapping and a protocol
of network management or performance measurement?

A middle ground for the IESG is to refuse development and/or
publication of specific new protocols that support anonymous
extraction/decryption of a target data stream. Members who want to
develop protocols incorporating audit trails can do so, all
others cannot (at least under the IETF's imprimatur).

The fact that an implementation could have the audit trail code
deleted is also irrelevant. The Key Question facing this list
is not whether we can stop BadGuys (crims or spooks, assuming
one even considers them substantively different) from hacking their
own saturday-night special. We're discussing what the IESG should
formally use as guiding principles when BadGuys come dressed in
sheeps clothing asking for tap-oriented protocol mods.

The question is nowhere near as simple as some posters have
concluded. But by now the raven has flown, and its nest ought
to be dismantled. If the IESG members reading haven't formulated
their own opinions already, I'd be very surprised.

cheers,
gja

_______________________________________________
raven mailing list
[email-masked]
http://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/raven

---

From: "Lyal Collins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 18:45:04 +1000

I'd like to add a different dimension to the discussion; namely, is it a
discussion that's occuring too early?

When monitoring for Law Enforcement occurs, I assume part of the rationale
is to attribute actions to a specific entity, for intelligence gathering or
evidentiary purposes.

There is no simple, repeatable, portable way to reliably attribute any
individual activity to anyone on the internet today.

Let me describe what I mean by that statement.
Two scenarios:
1) An ISP can log access by a user account, including the verification of
the password.
2) A message server, or web server can verify a digital signature on a
message.

Now roll forward to a court case,  and the defendant says:
"Your honour, I use a xxx operating system for Internet access and
certificate/private key storage.  I share this machine with other household
members, and have just learned that security flaws exist in the operating
system, called keyboard sniffers and ceretificate stealing viruses.  I am
unskilled in these things, and don't know how to control use of the machine
or digital certificate.  Thus, the electronic evidence cannot be shown to
relate to me.  As I have no idea how these messages came to exist, please
dismiss the case."

Reasonable doubt suggest case dismissal is a distinct possibility - at least
to me, an acknowledged non-lawyer.

Why might this occur?
3 possible reasons.
1.  The UK case of John Munden adds some light. Munden, a UK policeman,
returned from overseas holidays to find unauthorised ATM transactions on his
bank statement.  When queried, the bank said "our systems are perfect,
therefore you are trying to fraud us", and proceeded to charge Munden.
After some time the case was acquitted when the bank could not/did not
provide documentary evidence to  a) verify the bank's claim to financial
security standards compliance across _all_ their internal process and
systems, nor b) prove that internal bank staff could not have accessed
customer PINs.
2. Banks are liable for verifying signatures on cheques - the 'relying
party' concept.  Customers are not liable for failing to prevent third party
access to the cheque-book.
3.  Noone should ever rely on a digital signature that was generated under
unknown circumstances.  All anyone really knows about a digital signature
(in the current IPSec, X.509, PKCS, S/MIME standards), is that a machine
knew your Private Key, not who used it, or which machine it was on, or when.
"Unknown circumstances" covers all the un-evaluated, buggy, hacked, or
malicious-code infected computers of the world, or about 99.9% of Internet
access terminals for those who like numbers.   PCs are inadequate for this
sort of task, and would be mostly unreliable for court case evidence.

Without end to end, reliable evidence to back assertions, courts _may_
reject the contribution the monitoring-tapping produces.

The issue is that of relying party confidence in digital signatures and
off-site password verification.  If the infrastructre of the Internet cannot
support reliable authentication and the attibution of activities to
individuals, then whatever monitoring happens is probably legally worthless.

Perhaps the suggestion we should consider is:
 - Let's shelve this monitoring issue, and work out a reliable, cross
platform authentication standard.
 - This must contain "confidence of origination" to in addition to "proof of
identity" in a message.

BUT-  before anyone flames me about digital certificates and smartcards or
their operating system of the month et al, please remember that use of a
single technology does _not_ prove attribution, merely proof an activity
occured, not by whom, when, or where.  A better chain of evidence, from
certificate issuing to each specific use of a Private Key is needed for all
relying parties to have confidence.

Regards,
Lyal

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of
> Grenville Armitage
> Sent: 29 October 1999 17:50
> To: raven
> Subject: [Raven] Fly away, raven
>
>
>
[snip]

---

From: Paul Ferguson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 07:45:06 -0400

>discussion that's occuring too early?

Not at all. I personally think it was a very good idea to begin
internal IETF dialog on this issue, and subsequently formulate a
consensus (which I believe is crystal clear), before being formally
approached by any law enforcement or intelligentsia to provide
assistance in the manners which we have discussed.

Why do you think that this discussion may be occurring too early?
Is some revelation going to appear which will force us all to
rethink our positions & accept the fact that law enforcement
entities need expanded snooping capabilities in the digital
age? I don't think so.

As has been stated many times already, they probably already have
the means available to do so anyway (except in the case of strong
encryption with no key escrow/recovery).

If the IETF, IESG, IAB, and ISOC take a unified and formal position
on this issue (and I believe it will -- that we are impartial to the
CALEA proposals on their face, but will not take steps to intentionally
design weaknesses or specific wiretapping capabilities for VoIP into
existing and future Internet protocols), then I also think that we will
have quite a few supporters. Within the US, at least, these will most
likely include the ACLU, the EFF, the CDT (Center for Democracy and
Technology), EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center), Privacy
International, and a host of other privacy interest organizations
around the world. So we certainly will not be persecuted for our
position, in my opinion, if we steer that course.

If we take this sort of "formal" position, I believe the only detractors
we will have are (a) over-zealous law enforcement types who want easy
access to private communications, and (b) politicians who want a police
state under the guise of "the war on drugs, national security, and
dangers to children on the Internet."

Personally, I think anyone who believes that law enforcement needs
expanded capabilities in the digital age needs to be avoided at all
costs. But I'll stow my emotional opinions for another, more
appropriate, time.

Be afraid, be very afraid. Methnks this is indicative of a much
larger, and darker, issue.

$.02, and speaking only for myself,

- paul (concerned citizen)

---

From: Matthew Saroff <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 07:25:36 -0500

> relate to me.  As I have no idea how these messages came to exist, please
	Happened in the US an admittedly inept (he wrote down root passwords
and kept them in a public place) sysop was conficted of hacking and doing
damage to his system.  His defense was that anyone could have accessed the
system.  This was circa 1989.
> reject the contribution the monitoring-tapping produces.
	Not in the us, particaularly not in the instance of the "war on drugs",
and they get to seize your bank account, home, car, etc, on probably cause
without ever filing charges in the US.

-- 
Matthew Saroff
Do not reply directly to this message.  Reply to
[email-masked]

---

From: "Lyal Collins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 Oct 1999 13:18:35 +1000

I meant early, in that the outcome of such a standard won't be much use to
anyone until reliable attribution is possible.
The industry seems to be a long way from acheiving that goal.

Without attribution capabilities, the majority of information gathered by
any form of monitoring will be of dubious quality.

Regards,
Lyal

> From: Paul Ferguson [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: 29 October 1999 21:45
> To: Lyal Collins
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: RE: [Raven] Fly away, raven
>
>