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Comment by swordswinger12 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure you're right about that. There are legitimate reasons to criticize this paper (its unclear, confusing security claims, for one) but the basic functionality they build can be used for an IDS, which seems beneficial to users to me.

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A skim should clarify the security claims as much as needed - it's a complexifying of encryption schemes in order to accommodate third-party communications escrow.

Any communications-auditing regime relies on detecting and preventing steganography. This can be immediate successful, but is an endless escalation that should cause honest people (ie those who aren't trying to restrict communication) to focus on node security.

While an IDS can indeed benefit end users, its same functionality can be implemented as edge software - either on the nodes, or if worried about nodes being already compromised, then a separate "network processor" domain. The only point of needing a centralized IDS is the centralization - top-down control.

In line with the principle of charity I'd like to point out that your declaration here that network IDS provides only "minor cost savings" is controversial to the point of almost being aggressive towards folks working in information security. In the same vein, I'm simply disregarding the politically charged motive you assign to the technology.

If that was your intent (to start a political argument), then so be it, but if instead of picking a fight you would like to understand the problem space better there are plenty of smart folks on HN and elsewhere who can provide use cases and data ... to say nothing of vendors who will argue from either side depending on what they are selling.

hth, adric

Well, I removed "minor cost savings", because even that is being too charitable. Silicon is cheap, and it wouldn't take much of it to create a separate network processing domain on each node, which would perform all the functions of an IDS on cleartext, but working for the node's owner rather than whomever supplies them network transit. It's also better security with regards to heterogeneous nodes, telecommuting, unenumerable Internet links etc.

Information architectures can't help but being simultaneously technical and political. The original "End to End principle" came out of utterly technical concerns. But codified into a principle, it becomes "political". This is inevitable, because the drawbacks of poor engineering aren't felt immediately, and in fact can be quite beneficial in the short term.

There are of course plenty of vendors selling top-down "security". Right in this paper, they say "the market for such DPI devices is expected to grow to over $2B by 2018". Power tends to centralize until it collapses, which is why we as individuals must work to rebuke such trends.

Actions can be deeply political, weither you acknowledge that fact or not. Do you think providing dpi capabilities to nations like china, where the information is used to tourture and kill people is in any way politically neutral?

Closing your eyes and pretending the politics don't exist dosen't make them go away.

No, I'm sorry, that's not how cryptography works. A 'skim' clarifies nothing - you need precise proofs to understand security. And yes, I'm aware they provide proofs in the extended report, but the adversarial model seems not to model a real attacker particularly well. Here's a concrete question affecting real-world security that is seemingly unaddressed: what does their scheme leak about the frequency of rule matches? Can an adversarial middlebox see that some rules are matched more frequently than others? Are there rule sets for which this frequency information allows the adversary to guess plaintexts?

"as much as needed" being my key phrase. The parties interested in the "benefits" of such a scheme are attackers (governments and ISPs). A scheme touting designed-in attacks just isn't that interesting otherwise.

The old field of electronic payments is littered with papers detailing "secure" systems, but who's only novel contribution was a way of defeating security. They all went nowhere because to any organization that had the power to force adoption of such a scheme, preventing any encryption still offered the best value proposition.

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