September 12th, 2008
China proposes UN policy to defeat anonymity
Troubling news from the United Nations, via News.com
A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous.
The U.S. National Security Agency is also participating in the “IP Traceback” drafting group, named Q6/17, which is meeting next week in Geneva to work on the traceback proposal. Members of Q6/17 have declined to release key documents, and meetings are closed to the public.
A document submitted by China says: “IP traceback mechanism is required to be adapted to various network environments, such as different addressing (IPv4 and IPv6), different access methods (wire and wireless) and different access technologies (ADSL, cable, Ethernet) and etc.” “To ensure traceability, essential information of the originator should be logged.”
Such a traceback mechanism goes against the UN’s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Columbia University computer scientist Steve Bellovin, who wrote his own traceback proposal years ago.
To prevent this sort of abuse, a network-based traceback facility should yield no more information than is already necessary for the network to function. In the Internet, that means source IP addresses, which are present in every legitimate packet. (The traceback facility I worked on had that property.) I’ll take it a step further: any design process for a new network should at least consider eliminating even that, since source addresses convey geographical information to the packets’ recipients.
