Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • December 8, 2020 4:45 PM

@ David Rudling,

Like you,

I am still trying to digest the IETF memo but I already have an unease…

But mine is slightly different, I know that for a multitude of reasons TOR is insecure and easily susceptable to traffic analysis by the likes of CloudFlare and others with a wide area viewpoint over the Internet “choke points”. That’s even with a “three hop” minimum proxying.

Proxying is not in of it’s self secure, nor can it be, that was known by the Military and Similar communications security organisations from WWII onwards.

There are “known solutions” to the weaknesses of proxying in a Traffic analysis environment the first of which is “traffic indistinguishability” thus enabaling a lightly used protocol to not stand out or be diferentiable from more general traffic.

From my reading no real attempt has been made at “Traffic Indistinguishability” just a “magic pixi dust” sprinkling of partial “content security” and a virtualy usless single hop proxie that will have low latency thus high correlation between inputs and outputs.

Clive Robinson • December 9, 2020 11:20 AM

@ Eric Hacker,

I am beginning to think that privacy on the Internet is unachievable and we’d be better off admitting that.

A high degree of Privacy is obtainable with a broadcast –to the world– network, and we’ve known what is required to be done to achieve it since WWII.

There are however two problems,

1, Most people will not do what is required to achieve even minimal security.

2, There are entities both Governmental and Corporate who are more than willing to profit by the first issue.

The first issue is due to two things that are effectively one,

A, Most people care not a jot about their privacy.

B, They don’t believe they have anything to hide.

Both are realy a form of idiocy and shows, they show way to much trust to actually survive in even a moderately hostile environment, and if they come across any kind of hostility they know of no way of dealing with it because it is way beyond there understanding thus ability to handle rationaly.

With regards,

Responsible security professionals know that e-voting can’t be done reliably without paper trails

You appear to be conflating privacy, security and audit, they are different words because they are different activities. Whilst they do have some overlap the area where they all intersect is very small in comparison to where there is no intersection, and still small compared to the intersection where any two overlap.

The reality of most peoples lives is they do not want privacy or security untill one or both fail usually along with a “human trust” failing, and it is at this point or a little while later many start to wish they had an audit trail to show to others. Audit will not stop either privacy or secrecy being breached, but it will record the when and how of it as evidence, for later action.

The problem that security or privacy conscious individuals have is communicating with others. It’s rare to find two security conscious individuals that want to communicate with each other mostly it is one who cares and the rest that do not. This means that the chance of obtaining sufficient OpSec is low, very low, in deed.

I have a friend who works in some curious areas of security at what you might call “the sharp enf” and he is always pushing me to install a third party security Application which I repeatedly decline to do. He does not appear to understand why I do not. That is as I point out to him, he has no way to know what I am doing with my end of the comms link even if it is supposed to be secure. I might have malware reading/scraping the user interface, I might leave the application “un locked” or worse directly share the output with an enemy of my chosing or who is blackmailing me etc, etc. He points out he trusts me and I point out that is unwise as “past performance is no indicator of future performance”. I also point out about “fall back attacks” where a MiTM causes minimum common security which could be no security at all. He then makes the mistake of pointing out that “some securiry” is better than no security. I point out that infact the opposite is true, because assumed security leads to over confidence that leads to very real security losses if anything goes wrong technically… So the only thing we end up agreeing on is that we disagree about that aspect of security.

The problem from my perspective, is that people who pay to receive security advice chose to ignore it. But they are the payer of the piper, so the piper plays, they do not have to listen, but a listening and appreciative audience does make a pipers job more enjoyable.

Clive Robinson • December 10, 2020 12:30 PM

@ ALL,

It appears it’s not just this blog asking question about Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS (ODoH),

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25374745

Oh and if you look at the end of the innitial question there is a link to other information that might help detangle the mess the RFC is.

Clive Robinson • December 11, 2020 8:37 AM

@ Winter,

Maybe she or he is graded on their actions?

If that is so, then I predict a big fat F in somebodies future and a return to the job que in “Downtown barrel bottom” where scraping a living is the best they can hope to do.

Clive Robinson • December 11, 2020 12:26 PM

@ Anonymous,

Clive Robinson – Rest assured, I know the truth but I FINISHED now.

There you go again with the ego bolstering “I know the truth”.

But each time you say it you get challanged to “Put up or shut up” but you do neither.

You yet again say you are finished this time in “shouty letters” but something tells me you are just going to carry on lying to try to boost your depleted ego that demands you continue making a fool of yourself. Well more fool you, you loose every time.

You have proved beyond reasonable doubt that you can not tell let alone recognise the truth. But that does not stop you making false allegations and now false insinuations.

The question realy is when are you finalyvgoingvto realise thst not only have you lost here each time you just confirm to everyone that you are even more of a looser than the time before.

It’s got to the point where you realy should seek competent help.

As for,

stop provoking me

As though you are the injured party, let me assure you, you are not, and in fact anyone who reads this will see that by your falsehoods and insinuations you are actually provoking others.

So get the message,

Cease and desist, and others will likewise desist.

But otherwise why should they stop, they do after all have the right to defend themselves against your calumny lest their reputations be harmed by your falsehoods and insinuations.

Clive Robinson • December 12, 2020 3:43 AM

@ xcv,

DNS hijacking schemes have become extremely advanced and persistent throughout the infrastructure of the internet, even incorporated into the design and code of some open-source daemons such as “dhcp-client” used on Linux, Mac, and BSD operating systems.

Unfortunately “just stick a proxie in” as ODoH does is not going to solve this problem.

Because at the end of the day all an attacker has to do is change the target for their discovery process attack.

That is by far the majority of PC’s and other user devices do not have DNS or other infrastructute addresses hard coded in, they use some form of initial discovery process to find out bootp and DHCP being to notable methods of getting initial infrastructure IP addresses.

One problem is the client PC believes what it is told as it does not hold authentication information either.

But it gets worse in a lot of cases the “cache” or lookup table where these IP addresses are stored is likewis neither protected or authenticated, and can be changed easily at any time.

ODoH does not stop those attacks so they will work as well against the ODoH proxie address as well as they will against an other infrastructure service. Arguably it will make it easier.

As I’ve noted ODoH’s purpose is not to protect the client, but to disadvantage ISP’s thus significantly benifit the big Silicon Valley Corps in their collection of users private information.

From a security perspective ODoH offers so little in client/user security it is not worth the packet delay.

But it is a great way for the likes of CloudFlare to stop any real security thst would shut them out of their lucrative user data collection and aggregation.