[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`