industryterm:communication services

Keys Under Doormats:
mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all
data and communications
▻http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/97690/MIT-CSAIL-TR-2015-026.pdf

Twenty years ago, law enforcement organizations lobbied to require data and communication services to engineer their products to guarantee law enforcement access to all data. After lengthy debate and vigorous predictions of enforcement
channels “going dark,” these attempts to regulate the emerging Internet were abandoned. In the intervening years, innovation on the Internet flourished, and law enforcement agencies found new and more effective means of accessing vastly larger quantities of data. Today we are again hearing calls for regulation to mandate the
provision of exceptional access mechanisms. In this report, a group of computer scientists and security experts, many of whom participated in a 1997 study of these same topics, has convened to explore the likely effects of imposing extraordinary access mandates.

Une nouvelle technique anti-censure pourrait rendre impossible les blocages gouvernementaux de sites
►http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110810133023.htm
Des chercheurs font l’annonce d’une nouvelle approche permettant d’échapper à la censure sur internet, qui transformerait essentiellement l’ensemble du web en un serveur proxy, rendant impossible pour un gouvernement de censurer des sites spécifiques.

Une évolution particulièrement intéressante par exemple pour les blocages de site en Chine, et en France où la loi permet cela maintenant. Les chercheurs sont motivés apparemment par l’importance du net dans les mouvements du printemps :

“The Internet has the ability to catalyze change by empowering people through information and communication services. Repressive governments have responded by aggressively filtering it. If we can find ways to keep those channels open, we can give more people the ability to take part in free speech and access to information.”

When a user wants to visit a blacklisted site, he or she would establish a secure connection to an HTTPS website, which could be any password-protected site that isn’t blocked. This is a decoy connection. The Telex software marks the connection as a Telex request by inserting a secret-coded tag into the page headers. The tag utilizes a cryptographic technique called “public-key steganography.”

La limite résiderait dans le besoin d’un soutien de certains états à cette technique :

“It would likely require support from nations that are friendly to the cause of a free and open Internet,” Halderman said. “The problem with any one company doing this, for example, is they become a target. It’s a collective action problem. You want to do it on a wide scale that makes connecting to the Internet almost an all or nothing proposition for the repressive state.”

#censure