[CFP98] "How to Choke the Net"
Cypherpunks, The CFP98 program committee is considering a panel (or possibly a pre-conference tutorial) for next year entitled something like "How to Choke the Net." (The provocative title is NOT intended to espouse the practice of net-choking NOR to provide hands-on techniques.) "Many have argued that the net is so decentralized that no one country or force could control it, but is that really true? Many, including religions (Scientologists) and countries (China, et alia) have tried, but is the net so decentralized that it cannot be controlled, or are there choke points at which a single entity (or cartel of entities) could exploit to shape the net for their own political purposes, despite the efforts of others. The panel will explore the current state of the decentralization of the net and its potential for exploitation in an educational-style format." Discussion topics may include host authentication, denial-of-service attacks, DNS, IPSEC, routing issues and SYN-flooding, etc. If any of you has any course materials you'd like to deliver on the topic of Internet vulnerabilities and defenses, please contact me. dave
At 10:12 AM 9/30/97 -0700, Dave Del Torto thoughtfully expounded thus:
Cypherpunks,
The CFP98 program committee is considering a panel (or possibly a pre-conference tutorial) for next year entitled something like "How to Choke the Net." (The provocative title is NOT intended to espouse the practice of net-choking NOR to provide hands-on techniques.)
[snip] Dave, I think that the fact that 50 - 75 % of all packets _in the world_ (IIRC) go through MAE-EAST in Reston, VA means that any governmental entity controlling this NAP could filter/drop packets to their heart's content. I seem to recall a year or so back that Madsen, et. al. said that they were very certain that packet monitoring took place at major NAPS like this. For my own $.02 I think that the lack of success on this front has been due to sloth on various governments' parts, not for lack of ability. Considering that many third-world countries have limited connectivity into the high-speed backbones, typically through one or two interconnect points at most, (owned by their government-run PTT's) I think that any concerted effort on a government's part would be more successful than most think given that the Internet is not as seamless and redundant a network as one might think. (Yes, I recall the xs4all business last year, and feel that Western Europe's interconnectedness is currently an anomaly and not the norm, from a global point of view.) I would like to know if the general public's use of default DNS servers as setup or defined by most of the big ISP's would help this kind of control? <wandering into areas I know little about> I imagine that it is harder to block access if one controls routing and uses direct IP addresses, but considering that a lot of people find sites to look at via the various search engines; and considering the recent US rating proposals looking to not include unrated sites in search engines; I think that the possibility of effective site blocking for most casual internet users is not that far-fetched. </wandering into areas I know little about> A chef my wife knows in Thailand 'lost' some PGP mail coming to him once or twice, and then got a knock on the door asking him please not to use encrypted mail anymore: "... You are free to do whatever you want, but this is very suspicious activity that you might want to reconsider...." FWIW, Tom Porter txporter@mindspring.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." FIGHT U.S. GOVT. CRYPTO-FASCISM, EXPORT A CRYPTO SYSTEM! RSA in PERL: print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`
Dave Del Torto <ddt@pgp.com> writes:
Cypherpunks,
The CFP98 program committee is considering a panel (or possibly a pre-conference tutorial) for next year entitled something like "How to Choke the Net." (The provocative title is NOT intended to espouse the practice of net-choking NOR to provide hands-on techniques.)
[...]
Discussion topics may include host authentication, denial-of-service attacks, DNS, IPSEC, routing issues and SYN-flooding, etc.
Better keep you-know-who away from that conference, or he'll be calling for all and sundry to be locked up for discussing something which might result in his system going down :-) Adam -- Now officially an EAR violation... Have *you* violated EAR today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`
participants (3)
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Adam Back -
Dave Del Torto -
Thomas Porter