349 karma · joined May 5, 2018
then you would effectively DoS/DDoS the IPS. Now depending on how the system as a whole works it could be an efficient way to get through with a different attack that would normally be detected/blocked by IPS.
Just to prove your point - crucified Santa Claus [0]
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-21/how-the-iconography-o...
the 99/100 year lease is quite common in many Europan countries. It's not "exceptional" here
depending on sofistication of that solution you could imagine some forms of tunnelling to be efficient against that (IP-over-X). Then of course due to the complexity this workaround will be used by a tiny fraction of users.
>- block access to any data you cannot decrypt or from an endpoint you cannot backdoor
steganography would be a solution to this, you can decrypt the cat pictures I'm exchanging with friends but you may not be able to notice that those images have hidden content (which may also be encrypted)
>- do nothing, knowing that most users will avoid using anything that isn't one of the major web platforms
this seems to be a guaranteed-to-succeed solution. Probably much better than
>- run some kind of propaganda campaign on the evils of using unsanctioned software (supporting terrorism etc.)
since there is always a risk that this may backfire and encourage resistance in some groups
you just transfered a problem from ISP level to VPN operator level. While you could argue that using multiple VPNs from different countries could make this somewhat harder, the problem still exists. Especially if you consider metrics other than IP, for example specific packet sizes or timing patterns (for example, instead of users connecting to given IP, the adversary would look for users sending 640 byte packets every 300 seconds).
While the arguments that encryption of messages makes it impossible to know the contents of messages (and thus using the contents as evidence), however the ability to uncover the members/employees/cooperators of bad actor would make it easier to investigate them and/or use other means of targeted surveilance to obtain evidence. Also this would make it easier to infiltrate bad actor, since one of the uncovered users could be then coerced into cooperation.
(All above assumes that the app/platform is used only by members of "bad actor" and noone outside that organization is using the app. It is completely different if there are other users, perhaps even bad-actor users being a minority.)
With the developers outside jurisdiction, the problem is that while they of course might or might not be required to comply with the law, but they can still be coerced/manipulated/otherwise encouraged into providing a "patch" (backdoor) into the application.
I believe that much better solution would be to simply use any popular platform as a transport layer, with independent end-to-end encryption. Possibly with some steganography as well. The simplest example would be users exchanging memes/cat pictures - this will not stand out in any ISP/VPN traffic analysis. It will also not stand out (that much) in content analysis by any entity that can decrypt/access plain-content. The images being exchanged could then contain embedded (and end-to-end encrypted) content. While this is still far from perfect - you could imagine detection of repetitive images being sent, content/timing patterns or actual analysis of attachments for steganography but all those still require significantly more resources to work on massive scale.
Alternative would be to use custom platform but having as many "external" (in a sense of not working with/for bad actor) users as possible
and then the users of that platform would simply stand out in ISP logs making it actually easier to spot them. If this platform was a dedicated tool developed by/for a bad actor, then everyone working with/for that actor would be easily found.
Given that, it seems that steganography (combined with encryption) could be a solution with a "battle" between steganographic methods and algorithms to detect them
Depends, if the self-administering scientist is the only person at risk then I don't see any reason to believe it is not ethical. Assuming they are adult, sane persons it is ethical to take personal risk, at least in my book. Now, depending on what is being injected you could imagine a situation where this could pose risk to other people as well - for example a vaccination containing an active virus (through a design or mistake) that could spread outside the lab and infect others. This would NOT be ethical.
tldr: if the self-administering person does not put anyone else at risk it should be considered ethical
actually my post is not arguing with that, however facing the reality where interest tracking/profiling will become harder or impossible good old context-based ads might at some point become better alternative. Not because they're inherently more efficient but because, with changes like that, interest tracking might become infisible or too resource consuming
that would still pose a problem, not cost-wise, but you'd still need to download image after image. Will a single instance be capable of "downloading" all existing images every 6 months?
While I absolutely agree, it all depends on a scale. If you're using for example 10 cloud instances, x2 performance improvement will not justify extra person-months spent on developing more performant solution. On the other hand if you run 1000000 servers even 1% performance boost might be worth that effort.
given the sufficient scale of operation, it could be a pretty reliable mechanism probabilistically speaking.