Former DHS Assistant Secretary Stewart Baker On SOPA 2.0: Still A Disaster For Cybersecurity
from the no-surprise-there dept
One of the most credible critics of SOPA -- and one whose concerns certainly got the interest of Congress during the November Judiciary Committee hearings -- is Stewart Baker, the former Homeland Security Assistant Secretary and former NSA General Counsel, who argued that it would be a disaster for online security. So now that Lamar Smith has updated the bill to supposedly take into account the concerns of experts like Baker, how does he feel about the bill? Apparently, he still thinks it's a total disaster for online security:Unfortunately, the new version would still do great damage to Internet security, mainly by putting obstacles in the way of DNSSEC, a protocol designed to limit certain kinds of Internet crime.Baker lays out, in plain English, the problem here:
Today, it’s not uncommon for crooks to take over Internet connections in hotels, coffee shops and airports -- and then to direct users to fake websites. Users sent to a fake banking site are prompted to enter account and password data, which is used to loot the account. DNSSEC prevents such attacks by giving each website a signed credential that must be shown to the browser by the domain name system server before the connection can be completed.This is a pretty big problem, because SOPA has that nasty anti-circumvention clause in it. And just the very act of fraud detection is a form of circumvention, which will violate SOPA. Think about that for a second. Basically a browser that does the most secure and reasonable thing in the face of a possible man-in-the-middle attack... is now liable for breaking the anti-circumvention clause. This is pretty scary.
That’s a great idea, but crooks will predictably try to override it. Their best bet is to claim that the website doesn’t have a signed credential – a claim that will be plausible at least during the transition to DNSSEC. What should a browser do if a website says it doesn’t have a signed credential yet? The site might be telling the truth, or it might be a fake site backed by a DNS server that’s been tampered with. To find out, the browser needs to ask a second DNS server, and if that server doesn’t give an answer, a third and a fourth server until it gets an answer. That’s the only way to keep criminals from blocking the real DNS credentials and offering their own.
Unfortunately, the things a browser does to bypass a criminal site will also defeat SOPA’s scheme for blocking pirate sites. SOPA envisions the AG telling ISPs to block the address of www.piracy.com. So the browsers get no information about www.piracy.com from the ISP’s DNS server. Faced with silence from that server, the browser will go into fraud-prevention mode, casting about to find another DNS server that can give it the address. Eventually, it will find a server in, say, Canada. Free from the Attorney' General’s jurisdiction, the server will provide a signed address for piracy.com, and the browser will take its user to the authenticated site.
That’s what the browser should do if it’s dealing with a hijacked DNS server. But browser code can’t tell the Attorney General from a hijacker, so it will end up treating them both the same. And from the AG’s point of view, the browser’s efforts to find an authoritative DNS server will look like a deliberate effort to evade his blocking order.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that this provision is aimed squarely at the browser companies. Browsers implementing DNSSEC will have to circumvent and bypass criminal blocking, and in the process, they will also circumvent and bypass SOPA orders. The new bill allows the AG to sue the browsers if he decides he cares more about enforcing his blocking orders than about the security risks faced by Internet users. Indeed, the opaque language about “another in concert with such entity” makes perfect sense in the context of browser extensions. It allows the AG to sue not just browsers but also add-ons with this feature.The end result, of course, is that companies will avoid implementing DNSSEC -- an important standard that's been under careful development for over a decade:
Now imagine you are Microsoft, or Google, or Apple, or Mozilla. The DNSSEC guys come to you and ask you to implement DNSSEC. It won’t increase your revenue, they admit, but it will make the Internet much safer for your users. You want to be a good internet citizen, so you think maybe you should devote some precious code-writing resources to the cause. But first you ask your lawyers whether they foresee any problems.Yeah. Basically, sixteen years of hard work to build a system that will prevent man-in-the-middle attacks and keep the internet much safer... washed completely down the drain because Hollywood still can't understand basic economics of how to make money online. And folks in Congress actually think this is a good idea?
“Well, yes,” they’d have to say. “If you add code to the browser that implements DNSSEC, you’ll have to add code that circumvents criminal hijackings of the DNS system. And that code can be declared illegal by the Attorney General pretty much whenever he likes. You can litigate about it, of course, but if you lose, the AG can shut down all shipments of your browser until it’s been revised to the satisfaction of his staff and their advisers in Hollywood.”
Faced with that advice, would you implement DNSSEC?
Neither would I.
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Filed Under: copyright, cybersecurity, online security, sopa, stewart baker
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So when will DNSSEC be available?
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Re: So when will DNSSEC be available?
Lmgtfy.
Andrew Odlyzko: “The myth of Internet time”
You should know who Andy Odlyzko is. (Formerly AT&T, now University of Minnesota DTC., very well-respected, and extremely intelligent.)
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Re: So when will DNSSEC be available?
Well, John Doe, if it sounds easy to you, it must really be easy.
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Re: So when will DNSSEC be available?
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Re: Re: So when will DNSSEC be available?
“The world is home to 7 billion people, one third of which are using the Internet.”
—ITU, The World in 2011: ICT Facts and Figures
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Re: Re: So when will DNSSEC be available?
And I'm not surprised it's taken 16 years as it's basically a roll-over/roll-across fail safe and would have to be tested and restested 18 different ways come Sunday then tested and retested again.
But heck, Congress and the entertianment industry can toss that out the window because who cares about security when all that matters is Hollywood's money and, ahhhhhhhhhh, deliberate mistruths.
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Re: So when will DNSSEC be available?
You might as well ask why its taken Microsoft the same amount of time to come out with an OS that both works well and is relatively secure. That sounds easy, right?
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They don't understand SHIT
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Re: They don't understand SHIT
Do they really know how anything works? Or the real effects of the legislation they are passing? I would equate a career politician to a career professor. They may have lots of book smarts, but they really have no understanding of how things work in the real world.
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Re: Re: They don't understand SHIT
Politicians should be required to spend a day like a common citizen in poor and middle classes, a day trying to understand anything they want to legislate on etc etc
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The problem? Sixteen years of hard work resulted in a system that few if any actually use, few have implemented, and few have plans to implement in the reasonable time frame future.
Using DNSSEC to block SOPA is like using the "future flying car in every garage" idea to block fund for roads.
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Re:
Your analogy is flawed. Flying cars still need the ground. And they don't adress any security or structural issue like DNSSEC. Please troll harder.
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The point is really that DNSSEC is a great idea that is still a non-implemented pipe dream, and that was admitted by the people who created it. It's not generally in use, and there is little movement towards using it. In fact, outside of the true tech heads around here, most people wouldn't have known what it was until EFF started going off about it during their anti-SOPA campaign.
Basically, it's "one day we might have this security system for something, so you can ignore all the crime now because one day we will fix something else".
Further, given the restrictions of SOPA, I am confident that a modified DNSSEC style protocol will exist that will allow for local exclusions, while maintaining security.
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Top Headlines from DNSSEC Deployment.Org:
• Czech mobile operator Vodafone now secured with DNSSEC (Dec 12, 2011)
• Paypal, more ccTLDs deploy DNSSEC (Dec 9, 2011)
• Comcast signs 90% of its domain names; urges commerce, banking domain owners to deploy DNSSEC (Dec 8, 2011)
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Perhaps, but your flying car insurance will cost so much that you'll beg to go back to paying for roads. The reason flying cars are not workable for the foreseeable future is a human issue.
It's not generally in use, and there is little movement towards using it.
You're wrong about that. There has been tremendous movement in the past year or so to really get it working. It's like the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. There's so many things that can go wrong when you're changing one of the fundamental pieces of an incredibly complex system (the internet). So the prudent approach is to test, retest, and implement slowly, monitor, and make sure it works the way its supposed to before moving on to the next bit.
I am confident that a modified DNSSEC style protocol will exist that will allow for local exclusions, while maintaining security.
If you can give a detailed overview of exactly how that would work, even in theory, I'll listen. Otherwise you're just wildly speculating on something you know nothing about.
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They need to head back to the drawing board to allow for some sort of regionalization, otherwise the system will never be truly secure and fully adopted.
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That's new. Also, completely and utterly wrong, at least in the way I think you mean it. Because you know, I am a network technician, and I am in computer security at one of the largest banks in the country.
Any country with any sort of filtering (I am thinking all of the middle east, much of Asia, some of Europe, etc) cannot use DNSSEC. That is a major strike against it.
That is a tremendous benefit to it. DNSSEC is specifically designed not to allow anyone (be it a nation state or your 12 year old neighbor who has hacked your router) to break the trust chain between you and the authoritative DNS root servers. If you poke a hole in it to allow country XYZ to intercept or modify the communication between you and the DNS servers, it is by definition no longer secure.
otherwise the system will never be truly secure and fully adopted.
No system is ever "truly secure" nor is fully 100% adoption necessary for a determination of success. Not every risk can be perfectly mitigated. There will always be those who do not use standards and work out their own solutions. But those are not good reasons for intentionally designing something with gaping security holes.
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Can you imagine the frustration of hiding behind a door for a couple of hours, ready to steal the wallet/purse of whoever walks through the door, only for everyone to just walk around you and your door? That's exactly what SOPA is met to prevent on the Internet!
With SOPA everyone will have to walk right through your door and get robbed, rather than go around your ambush! And when anyone goes around your door you can complain to the US AG for their circumvention! If you're feeling generous enough you might even let the AG take a share of your loot from your identity theft!
And the system will even benefit you the consumer. If you walk through an identity thieves' door (and get your identity and money stolen in the process), the AG won't fine you or throw you in jail for circumvention! Everyone wins!
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Re:
Just read this tweet from Public Knowledge and then your post. Priceless.
It's broken, it shouldn't even be taking them that much time to strike it down.
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and they always told me crime doesn't pay
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SOPA doing what it was designed to do?
I jest... right?
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Hopefully there will be a call to a lot more than just a tent and walking around with a poster.I am really angry and disgusted.
SOPA/PIPA is a direct assault on this whole Country.If only I had a little more money as I would love to put a website up called boycott hollywood or something like that.
And I am also ready to go to Washington and March on that Cancer along with millions.I do not think in the end they are really going to get away with this untouched.
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Let's pretend that it does pass...
Also, once a domain has been blacklisted, the criminals could just choose a different one. Really, how hard would it be to scam this new system?
This is clearly just a rouse. The Fed wants a nice little perch on your headset, so it can spoon feed you fascist bullshit via the Internet (yes, I'm one of those people).
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But it can be beat with a host file.
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Re:
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http://www.mspy.com
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