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Comment by lakeviewterrace | Hacker News Reader

So they don't actually know what this network is, just who owns the IP space... time for a blog post to advertise our week-old service!

There is no evidence that physically ties this to the WH. It could be in a security lab for all they know. Or a guest network for the news media.

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> There is no evidence that physically ties this to the WH.

They don't need to be physically inside a specific building to be a networking security problem.

The core issue is whether an outsider has bypassed your firewall and can send+receive traffic from a node which is getting more trust than it deserves. If they've compromised the computer's microphone/camera/wifi-control that's an additional problem.

"We don't know where the devices that appear to have breached the WH network are located. For all we know, they could be in Beijing or Moscow."

That seems significantly worse.

Is it some like like NordVPN? It has an option to act as a residential proxy (useful to evade VPN IP blocks)

Perhaps ping time measurements could help identify where the devices are physically located.

If you were really sneaky, could you add some small jitter to the network responses to make it more difficult to locate?

No. You would need to add hundreds of milliseconds depending on the sender's location.

Jitter is not a defense against statistical analysis. Additional lag might be what you want.

Additional constant delay? Isn't that also easily defeated when you're measuring from multiple nodes?

You can only _add_ jitter. So presumably you make people think you're farther away than you really are. I guess if you're especially clever, you can manufacture responses to packets you haven't sent yet to throw people off.

Or just block inbound ICMP.

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