| Human Rights Protocol Considerations Research Group | N. ten Oever |
| Internet-Draft | Article19 |
| Intended status: Informational | C. Cath |
| Expires: November 6, 2016 | Oxford Internet Institute |
| May 05, 2016 |
Research into Human Rights Protocol Considerations
draft-tenoever-hrpc-research-01
The increased intertwinement of Internet and society increases the impact of the Internet on the lives of individuals. Because of this, the design and development of the architecture of the Internet also has an increasing impact on society. This has led to an increasing recognition that human rights [UDHR] [ICCPR] [ICESCR] have a role in the development and management of the Internet [HRC2012] [UNGA2013] [NETmundial]. It has also been argued that the Internet should be strenghtened as a human rights enabeling environment [Brown].
This document provides a proposal for a glossary to discuss the relation between human rights and Internet protocols, an overview of the discussion, a proposal for the mapping of the relation between human rights and technical concepts, and a proposal for guidelines for human rights considerations, similar to the work done on the guidelines for privacy considerations [RFC6973].
Discussion of this draft at: hrpc@irtf.org // https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/hrpc
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"There's a freedom about the Internet: As long as we accept the rules of sending packets around, we can send packets containing anything to anywhere."
This document aims to expose the relation between protocols and human rights, propose possible guidelines to protect the Internet as a human-rights-enabling environment in future protocol development, in a manner similar to the work done for Privacy Considerations in [RFC6973], and to to increase the awareness in both the human rights community and the technical community on the importance of the technical workings of the Internet and its impact on human rights.
Open, secure and reliable connectivity is necessary (although not sufficient) to excercise the human rights such as freedom of expression and freedom of association, as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR]. The Internet aims to be a global network of networks that provides unfettered connectivity to all users at all times and for any content [RFC1958]. This objective of stimulating global connectivity contributes to the Internets role as an enabler of human rights. Next to that, the strong commitment to security [RFC1984][RFC3365] and privacy [RFC6973] [RFC7258] in the Internets architectural design equally strongly contributes to the strenghtening of the Internet as a human rights enabeling environment. One could even argue that the Internet is not only an enabler of human rights, but that human rights lie at the basis of, and are ingrained in, the architecture of the network. Internet Engineers have defined the Internet as a network of networks, providing connectivity for all users, at all times, for any content. Internet connectivity increases the capacity for individuals to exercise their rights, the core of the Internet, its architectural design is therefore closely intertwined with the human rights framework [CathandFloridi].
While the Internet was designed with freedom and openness of communications as core values, as the scale and the commercialization of the Internet has grown greatly, topics like access, rights and connectivity are forced to compete with other values. Therefore, decisive and human rights enabling characteristics of the Internet might be degraded if they’re not properly defined, described and protected as such. And, the other way around, not protecting human right enabeling characteristics could also result in (partial) loss of functionality and connectivity, and other inherent parts of the Internets architecture.
The IETF has produced guidelines and procedures to ensure and galvanize the privacy and security of the network in protocol development. This document aims to explore the possibility of the development of similar procedures for guidelines for human rights considerations to ensure that protocols developed in the IETF do not have an adverse impact on the enjoyment of human rights on the Internet.
In the discussion of human rights and Internet architecture concepts that have been developed and computer science, networking, law, policy-making and advocacy are coming together. The same concepts might have a very different meaning and implications in another area of expertise. In order to foster a constructive interdisciplinary debate, and minimize differences in interpretation, the following glossary is provided.
Heterogenity : The Internet is characterized by heterogeneity on many levels: devices and nodes, router scheduling algorithms and queue management mechanisms, routing protocols, levels of multiplexing, protocol versions and implementations, underlying link layers (e.g., point-to-point, multi-access links, wireless, FDDI, etc.), in the traffic mix and in the levels of congestion at different times and places. Moreover, as the Internet is composed of autonomous organizations and internet service providers, each with their own separate policy concerns, there is a large heterogeneity of administrative domains and pricing structures. As a result, heterogeneity principle is proposed in [RFC1958] to be supported by design. [FIArch]
Internet censorship : Internet censorship is the intentional suppression of information originating, flowing or stored on systems connected to the Internet where that information is relevant for decision making to some entity. [Elahi]
“Internationalization is the design and development of a product, application or document content that enables easy localization for target audiences that vary in culture, region, or language.” [W3Ci18nDef]
Many protocols that handle text only handle one charset (US-ASCII), or leave the question of what CCS and encoding are used up to local guesswork (which leads, of course, to interoperability problems). If multiple charsets are permitted, they must be explicitly identified [RFC2277]. Adding non-ASCII text to a protocol allows the protocol to handle more scripts, hopefully all of the ones useful in the world. In today’s world, that is normally best accomplished by allowing Unicode encoded in UTF-8 only, thereby shifting conversion issues away from individual choices.
Localization is the act of tailoring an application for a different language or script or culture. Some internationalized applications can handle a wide variety of languages. Typical users only understand a small number of languages, so the program must be tailored to interact with users in just the languages they know.
The major work of localization is translating the user interface and documentation. Localization involves not only changing the language interaction, but also other relevant changes such as display of numbers, dates, currency, and so on. The better internationalized an application is, the easier it is to localize it for a particular language and character encoding scheme.
Localization is rarely an IETF matter, and protocols that are merely localized, even if they are serially localized for several locations, are generally considered unsatisfactory for the global Internet.
The right to privacy is also recognized in nearly every national constitution and in most international human rights treaties. It has been adjudicated upon both by international and regional bodies. The right to privacy is also legally protected at the national level through provisions in civil and/or criminal codes.
The combination of reliability, confidentiality, integrity, anonymity, and authenticity is what makes up security on the Internet.
( Reliability ) ( Confidentiality ) ( Integrity ) = communication and information security (technical) ( Authenticity ) ( Anonymity )
The combination of End-to-End, Interoperability, resilience, reliability and robustness is what makes us connectivity on the Internet
( End-to-End )
connectivity = ( Interoperability )
( Resilience )
( Reliability )
( Robustness )
( Autonomy )
( Simplicity )
The Human Rights Protocol Considerations Research Group (hrpc) in the Internet Research Taskforce (IRTF) embarked on its mission to answer the following two questions which are also the main two questions which this documents seeks to answer:
Protocols and standards are regularly seen as merely performing technical functions. However, these protocols and standards do not exist outside of their technical context nor outside of their political,historical, economic, legal or cultural context. This is best exemplified by the way in which protocols have become part and parcel of political processes and public policies: one only has to look at the IANA transition, the RFC on pervasive monitoring or global innovation policy for concrete examples [Denardis15]. To quote [Abbate]: “protocols are politics by other means”. Since the late 1990’s a burgeoning group of academics and practitioners researched questions surrounding the societal impact of protocols. These studies vary in focus and scope: some focus on specific standards [Davidsonetal] [Musiani], others look into the political, legal, commercial or social impact of protocols [BrownMarsden] [Lessig], [Mueller]. Commercial and political influences on the management of the Internet’s architecture are well-documented in the academic literature and will thus not be discussed here [Benkler] [Brownetal] [Denardis15] [Lessig] [Mueller] [Zittrain]. It is enough to say that the IETF consistently tries to push back against the standardization of surveillance and certain other issues that negatively influence end-users’ experience of the Internet [Denardis14]. The role human rights play in technical engineering is much less clear. Understanding how protocols and standards impact human rights, especially the right to freedom of expression and freedom of association and assembly is crucial. Questions at the intersection of human rights and Internet architecture management are particularly important as Internet Standard Developing Organizations (SDOs) are the arenas for contention over human rights and the role of technical engineers to protect human rights by design [Brownetal] [Clarketal] [Denardis14] [Lessig] [Rachovitsa]. In the academic literature four clear positions can be discerned, in relation to the role of human rights in protocol design and how to account for these human rights in protocol development: Clark et al. argue that there is a need to ‘design for variation in outcome, so that the outcome can be different in different places, and the tussle takes place within the design (…) [as] Rigid designs will be broken; designs that permit variation will flex under pressure and survive [Clarketal].’ They hold that human rights should not be hard-coded into protocols because of four reasons: first, the rights in the UDHR are not absolute. Second, technology is not the only tool in the tussle over human rights. Third, there are inherent dangers to blunting the tools of enforcement and last but not least, it is dangerous to make promises that can’t be kept. The open nature of the Internet will never, they argue, be enough to fully protect individuals’ human rights.
Conversely, Brown et al. [Brownetal] state that ‘some key, universal values – of which the UDHR is the most legitimate expression – should be baked into the architecture at design time.’ They argue that design choices have offline consequences, and are able shape the power positions of groups or individuals in society. As such, the individuals making these technical decisions have a moral obligation to take into account the impact of their decisions on society, and by extension human rights. Brown et al recognise that values and the implementation of human rights vary across the globe. Yet they argue that all members of the United Nations have found ‘common agreement on the values proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In looking for the most legitimate set of global values to embed in the future Internet architecture, the UDHR has the democratic assent of a significant fraction of the planet’s population, through their elected representatives.”
The main disagreement between these two positions lies mostly in the question on whether a particular value system should be build into the Internet’s architecture or whether the architecture needs to account for a varying set of values. A third position that is similar to that of Brown et al., is taken by [Broeders] who argues that ‘we must find ways to continue guaranteeing the overall integrity and functionality of the public core of the Internet.’ He argues that the best way to do this is by declaring the backbone of the Internet - which includes the tcp/ip ProtocolSuite, numerous standards, the Domain Name System (dns), and routing protocols- a common public good. This is a different approach then that of [Clarketal] and [Brownetal] because he does not suggest that social values should (or should not) be explicitly coded into the Internet’s architecture, but rather that the existing architecture should be seen as an entity of public value. Bless and Orwat [Bless] represents a fourth position. They argue that ‘pure technical solutions for enabling, enforcing or restricting rights/values are often costly, insufficient, inflexible, may have unintended consequences or create stakeholders with too much power’. They argue that it is important to search for solutions that ‘create awareness in the technical community about impact of design choices on social values. And work towards a methodology for co-design of technical and institutional systems.’ Our position is that hard-coding human rights into protocols in addition to being undesirable is also impossible, because each situation is dependent on its context. It is however important to make consicious and explicit design decisions that take into account the human rights protocol considerations guidelines developed below. This will ensure that the impact protocols can have on human rights is clear and explicit, both for developers and for users. In addition, it ensures that the impact of specific protocol on human rights is carefully considered and that concrete design decisions are documented in the protocol.
This document details the steps taken in the research into human rights protocol considerations by the HRPC group to clarify the relation between technical concepts used in the IETF and human rights. And sets out some preliminary of steps and considerations for engineers to take into account when developing standards and protocols.
Mapping the relation between human rights and protocols and architectures is a new research challenge, which requires a good amount of interdisciplinary and cross organizational cooperation to develop a consistent methodology. While the authors of this first draft are involved in both human rights advocacy and research on Internet technologies - we believe that bringing this work into the IRTF facilitates and improves this work by bringing human rights experts together with the community of researchers and developers of Internet standards and technologies.
The methodological choices made in this document are based on the political science-based method of discourse analysis and ethnographic research methods. This work departs from the assumption that language reflects the understanding of concepts. Or as [Jabri] holds, policy documents are ‘social relations represented in texts where language is used to construct meaning and representation’. This process happens in ‘the social space of society’ [Schroeder] and manifests itself in institutions and organizations [King] which were exposed using the ethnographic methods of semi-structured interviews and participant observation.
The discourse analysis was operationalized using qualitative and quantitative means. The first step was for the research group to read RFCs and other official IETF documents. The second step was the use of a pyhon-based analyzer, using the tool Big Bang, adapted by Nick Doty [Doty] to scan for the concepts that were identified as important architetural principels (distilled on the initial reading and supplemented by the interviews and participant observation). Such a quantitative method is very precise and speeds up the research process [Richie]. But this tool is unable to understand ‘latent meaning’ [Denzin]. In order to mitigate these issues of automated word-frequency based approaches, and to get a sense of the ‘thick meaning’ [Geertz] of the data, a second qualitative analysis of the data set was performed. These various rounds of discourse analysis were used to inform the interviews and further data analysis. The ethnographic methods of the data collection process allowed the research group to acquire the data necessary to ‘provide a holistic understanding of research participants’ views and actions’ [Denzin] that highlighted ongoing issues and case studies where protocols impact human rights. The interview participants were selected through purposive sampling [Babbie], as the research group was interested in getting a wide variety of opinions on the role of human rights in guiding protocol development. This sampling method also ensured that the individuals with extensive experience of working at the IETF in various roles were targeted. The interviewees included individuals in leadership positions (Working Group (WG) chairs, Area Directors (ADs)), ‘regular participants’, individuals working for specific entities (corporate, civil society, political, academic) and represented various backgrounds, nationalities and genders.
In order to map the potential relation between human rights and protocols, so far, the HRPC research group gathered data from three specific sources:
To start addressing the issue, a mapping exercise analyzing Internet architecture and protocols features, vis-a-vis possible impact on human rights is being undertaken. Therefore, research on the language used in current and historic RFCs and mailing list discussions is underway to expose core architectural principles, language and deliberations on human rights of those affected by the network.
Interviews with the current and past members of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), current and past members of the Internet Engineering Steering Group(IESG) and chairs of selected working groups and RFC authors. To get an insider understanding of how they view the relationship (if any) between human rights and protocols to play out in their work.
By participating in various working groups, in person at IETF meetings and on mailinglists, information was gathered about the IETFs day-to-day workings. From which which general themes, technical concepts, and use-cases about human rights and protocols were extracted.
The data above was processed using three consecutive strategies: mapping protocols related to human rights, extracting concepts from these protocols, and creation of a common glossary (detailed under 2. vocabulary used). Before going into these strategies some elaboration on the process of identifying technical concepts as they related to human rights needs to be given.
By combining data from the three data sources named above, an extensive list of protocols and standards that potentially enable the internet as a tool for freedom of expression and association was assembly. In order to determine this enabling (or inhibiting) featured we relied on direct references of such impact in the RFCs, as well as input from the community. On the basis of this analysis a list of RFCs that describe standards and protocols that are potentially more closely related to human rights were compiled.
Mapping the protocols and standards that are related to human rights and creating an human rights enabeling environment was the first step to focus on specific technical concepts that underlie these protocols and standards. On the basis of this list number of technical concepts that appeared frequently was extracted, and used to create a list of technical terms that combined create the enabling environment for excercising human rights on the Internet.
While interviewing experts and mapping RFCs and compiling technical definitions several concepts of convergence and divergence were identified. To ensure that the discussion was based on a common understanding of terms a list of terms was created. The definitions are based on definitions from other IETF documents, and if these were unavailable definitions were taken from definitions from other Standards Developing Organizations or academic literature.
The previous steps allowed for the clarification of relation between human rights and technical concepts. The steps taken show how the research process zoomed in, from compiling a broad lists of protocols and standards that relate to human rights to extracting the precise technical concepts that make up these protocols and standards in order to understand the relationship between the two. This sub-section presents the next step: translating human rights to technical concepts by matching the individuals components of the rights to the accompanying technical concepts, allowing for the creation of a list of technical concepts that combined create the enabling environment for human rights.
On the basis of the prior steps the following list of technical terms that combined create the enabling environment for human rights, such a freedom of expression and freedom of association was drafted.
Architectural principles Enabling features
and characteristics for user rights
/------------------------------------------------\
| |
+=================|=============================+ |
= | = |
= | End to end = |
= | Reliability = |
= | Resilience = Access as |
= | Interoperability = Human Right |
= Good enough | Transparency = |
= principle | Data minimization = |
= | Permissionless innovation = |
= Simplicity | Graceful degradation = |
= | Connectivity = |
= | Heterogeneity = |
= | = |
= | = |
= \------------------------------------------------/
= =
+===============================================+
This analysis aims to translate human rights concepts that impact or are impacted by the Internet as follows:
The combination of content agnosticism, connectivity, security, privacy (as defined in [RFC6973] ), and open standards are the technical principles that underlay freedom of expression on the Internet.
( Connectivity )
( Privacy )
( Security ) = Right to freedom of expression
( Content agnosticism )
( Internationalization )
( Censorship resistance )
( Open Standards )
( Heterogeneity support )
( Anonymity )
( Privacy ) = Right to non-discrimination
( Pseudonymity )
( Content agnosticism )
( Accessibility )
( Content Agnosticism )
( Security ) = Right to equal protection
( Accessibility )
( Internationalization ) = Right to political participation
( Censorship resistance )
( Open standards )
( Localization ) = Right to participate in cultural life,
( Internationalization ) arts and science
( Censorship resistance )
( Connectivity )
( Decentralization )
( Censorship resistance ) = Right to freedom of assembly
( Pseudonymity ) and association
( Anonymity )
( Security )
( Reliability )
( Confidentiality )
( Integrity ) = Right to security
( Authenticity )
( Anonymity )
Taken this information above, the following list of cases of protocols that adversely impact or enable human rights was formed.
The Internet Protocol version 4, known as ‘layer 3’ of the internet, and specified as a common encapsulation and protocol header, is defined by [RFC0791]. The evolution of Internet communications have led to continued development in this area, encapsulated in the development of version 6 of the protocol in [RFC2460]. In spite of this updated protocol, we find that 25 years after the specification of version 6 of the protocol, the older v4 standard continues to account for a sizeable majority of internet traffic, and most (if not all) of the issues discussed here are valid both for IPv4 as well as IPv6.
The internet was designed as a platform for free and open communication, most notably encoded in the end-to-end principle, and that philosophy is also present in the technical implementation of the Internet Protocol. [RFC3724] While the protocol was designed to exist in an environment where intelligence is at the end hosts, it has proven to provide sufficient information that a more intelligent network core can make policy decisions and enforce policy shaping and restricting the communications of end hosts. These capabilities for network control and limitations of the freedom of expression by end hosts can be traced back to the IPv4 design, helping us understand which technical protocol decisions have led to harm of these human rights.
Two major shifts have occurred to harm freedom of expression through misuse of the Internet Protocol. The first is the network’s exploitation of the public visibility of the host pairs for all communications, and the corresponding ability to discriminate and block traffic as a result of that metadata. The second is the selective development of IP options. Protocol extensions including Mobility and Multicasting have proposed alternate communication modes and suggest that different forms of assembly could be supported by an a robust IP layer. Instead, the protocol has limited the deployability of such extensions by not providing a mechanism for appropriate fallback behavior when unrecognized extensions are encountered.
The IPv4 protocol header contains fixed location fields for both the source and destination IP addresses [RFC0791]. These addresses identify both the host sending and receiving each message, and allow the core network to understand who is talking to whom, and to practically limit communication selectively between pairs of hosts. Blocking of communication based on the pair of source and destination is one of the most common limitations on the ability for hosts to communicate today, [caida] and can be seen as a restriction of the ability for those hosts to assemble or to consensually express themselves.
Inclusion of an Internet-wide identified source in the IP header is not the only possible design, especially since the protocol is most commonly implemented over Ethernet networks exposing only link-local identifiers. [RFC0894] A variety of alternative designs including source routing (which would allow for the sender to choose a per defined (safe) route, and spoofing of the source IP address are technically supported by the protocol, but neither are considered good practice on the Internet. While projects like [torproject] provide an alternative implementation of anonymity in connections, they have been developed in spite of the IPv4 protocol design.
The other major feature of the IP protocol header is that it specifies the protocol encapsulated in each message in an easily observable form, and does not encourage a design where the encapsulated protocol is not available to a network observer. This design has resulted in a proliferation of routers which inspect the inner protocol, and has resulted in a stagnation where only the TCP and UDP protocols are widely supported across the Internet. While the IP protocol was designed as the entire set of metadata needed for routing, subsequent enhanced routers have found value on making policy decisions based on the contents of TCP and UDP headers as well, and are encoded with the assumption that only these protocols will be used for data transfer. [spdy] [RFC4303] defines an encrypted encapsulation of additional protocols, but lacks widespread deployment and faces the same challenge as any other protocol of providing sufficient metadata with each message for routers to make positive policy decisions. Protocols like [RFC4906] have seen limited wide-area uptake, and these alternate designs are frequently re-implemented on top of UDP. [quic]
A major structural shift in the Internet which has undermined the protocol design of IPv4, and has significantly reduced the freedom of end users to communicate and assemble is the introduction network address translation. [RFC1631] Network address translation is a process whereby organizations and autonomous systems connect two networks by translating the IPv4 source and destination addresses between the two. This process puts the router performing the translation into a privileged position, where it can decide which subset of communications are worthy of translation, and whether an unknown request for communication will be correctly forwarded to a host on the other network.
This process of translation has widespread adoption despite promoting a process that goes against the stated end-to-end process of the underlying protocol [natusage]. In contrast, the proposed mechanism to provide support for mobility and forwarding to clients which may move, encoded instead as an option in the IP protocol in [RFC5944], has failed to gain traction. In this situation the compromise made in the design of the protocol resulted in a technology that does not fully encode freedom of expression in its design, eventhough a viable alternative that would do this exists.
The Domain Name System (DNS) [RFC1035], provides service discovery capabilities, and provides a mechanism to associate human readable names with services. The DNS system is organized around a set of independently operated ‘Root Servers’ run by organizations around the web which enact ICANN’s policy by answering queries for which organizations have been delegated to manage registration under each Top Level Domain (TLD). Top Level domains are maintained and determined by ICANN. These namespaces encompass several classes of services. The initial name spaces including ‘.Com’ and ‘.Net’, provide common spaces for expression of ideas, though their policies are enacted through US based companies. Other name spaces are delegated to specific nationalities, and may impose limits designed to focus speech in those forums both to promote speech from that nationality, and to comply with local limits on expression and social norms. Finally, the system has been recently expanded with additional generic and sponsored name spaces, for instance ‘.travel’ and ‘.ninja’, which are operated by a range of organizations which may independently determine their registration policies. This new development has both positive and negative implications in terms of enabling human rights. Some individuals argue that it undermines the right to freedom of expression because some of these new gtlds have restricted policies on registration and rules on hate speech content. Others argue that precisely these properties are positive because they enable certain (mostly minority) communities to build safer spaces for association. Thereby enabling their right to freedom of association. Often mentioned examples are applications like .gay.
DNS has significant privacy issues per [RFC7626]. Most notable are the lack of encryption to limit the visibility of requests for domain resolution from intermediary parties, and a limited deployment of DNSSEC to provide authentication, allowing the client to know that they have received a correct, “authoritative”, answer to a query.
Authentication through DNSSEC creates a validation path for records, this authenticates that the site that you visit is valid. As such DNSSEC protects the directory look-up and makes hijacking of a session harder. This is important because currently interference with the operation of the DNS has become one of the central mechanisms used to block access to websites. This interference limits both the freedom of expression of the publisher to offer their content, and the freedom of assembly for clients to congregate in a shared virtual space. There have been several mechanisms used impose these limitations based on the technical design of the DNS protocol. These have led to a number of situations where limits on expression have been imposed through subversion of the DNS protocol. Each of these situations has accompanying aspects of protocol design enabling those limitations.
There have been a number of cases where the records for a domain are removed from the name system due to real-world events. Examples of this removal includes the ‘seizure’ of wikileaks [bbc-wikileaks] and the names of illegally operating gambling operations by the United States ICE unit, which compelled the US-based registry in charge of the .com TLD to hand ownership of those domains over to the government. The same technique has been notably used by Libya to remove sites in violation of “our Country’s Law and Morality (which) do not allow any kind of pornography or its promotion.” [techyum]
At a protocol level, there is no technical auditing for name ownership, as in alternate systems like [namecoin]. As a result, there is no ability for users to differentiate seizure from the legitimate transfer of name ownership, which is purely a policy decision of registrars. While DNSSEC addresses network distortion events described below, it does not tackle this problem, which has the cooperation of (or compelled action by) the registry.
The most common mechanism by which the DNS system is abused to limit freedom of expression is through manipulation of protocol messages by the network. One form occurs at an organizational level, where client computers are instructed to use a local DNS resolver controlled by the organization. The DNS resolver will then selectively distort responses rather than request the authoritative lookup from the upstream system. The second form occurs through the use of deep packet inspection, where all DNS protocol messages are inspected by the network, and objectionable content is distorted, as in [turkey].
A notable instance of distortion has occurred in Greece [ververis], where a study found evidence of both of deep packet inspection to distort DNS replies, and overblocking of content, where ISPs prevented clients from resolving the names of domains which they were not instructed to do through the governmental order prompting the blocking systems there.
At a protocol level, the effectiveness of these attacks is made possible by a lack of authentication in the DNS protocol. DNSSEC provides the ability to determine authenticity of responses when used, but it is not regularly checked by resolvers. DNSSEC is not effective when the local resolver for a network is complicit in the distortion, for instance when the resolver assigned for use by an ISP is the source of injection. Selective distortion of records has also been made possible by the predictable structure of DNS messages, which make it computationally easy for a network device to watch all passing messages even at high speeds, and the lack of encryption, which allows the network to distort only an objectionable subset of protocol messages. Specific distortion mechanisms are discussed further in [hall].
Responding incorrectly to requests for name lookups is the most common mechanism that in-network devices use to limit the ability of end users to discover services. A deviation which accomplishes a similar objective, though may be seen as different from a freedom of expression perspective, is the injection of incorrect responses to queries. The most prominent example of this behavior occurs in China, where requests for lookups of sites which have been deemed inappropriate will trigger the network to respond with a false response, causing the client to ignore the real response when it subsequently arrives. [greatfirewall] Unlike the other forms of discussion discussed above, injection does not stifle the ability of a server to announce it’s name, it instead provides another voice which answers sooner. This is effective because without DNSSEC, the protocol will respond to whichever answer is received first, without listening for subsequent answers.
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), described in its version 1.1 in RFC 7230 to 7237, is a request-response application protocol developed throughout the 1990s, and factually contributed to the exponential growth of the Internet and the inter-connection of populations around the world. Because of its simple design, HTTP has become the foundation of most modern Internet platforms and communication systems, from websites, to chat systems, and computer-to-computer applications. In its manifestation with the World Wide Web, HTTP has radically revolutionized the course of technological development and the ways people interact with online content and with each other.
However, HTTP is also a fundamentally insecure protocol, that doesn’t natively provide encryption properties. While the definition of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), and later of Transport Layer Security (TLS), also happened during the 1990s, the fact that HTTP doesn’t mandate the use of such encryption layers to developers and service providers, caused a very late adoption. Only in the middle of the 2000s we observed big Internet service providers, such as Google, starting to provide encrypted access to their web services.
The lack of sensitivity and understanding of the critical importance of securing web traffic incentivized malicious and offensive actors to develop, deploy and utilize at large interception systems and later active injection attacks, in order to swipe large amounts of data, compromise Internet-enabled devices. The commercial availability of systems and tools to perform these types of attacks also led to a number of human rights abuses that have been discovered and reported over the years.
Generally we can identify in Traffic Interception and Traffic Manipulation the two most problematic attacks that can be performed against applications employing a clear-text HTTP transport layer. That being said, the IETF and especially the General Area Review Team (Gen-ART), is taking steady steps to move to HTTPS.
While we are seeing an increasing trend in the last couple of years to employ SSL/TLS as a secure traffic layer for HTTP-based applications, we are still far from seeing an ubiquitous use of encryption on the World Wide Web. It is important to consider that the adoption of SSL/TLS is also a relatively recent phenomena. Google introduced an option for its GMail users to navigate with SSL only in 2008 [Rideout], and turned SSL on by default later in 2010 [Schillace]. It took an increasing amount of security breaches and revelations on global surveillance from Edward Snowden to have other Internet service providers to follow Google’s lead. For example, Yahoo enabled SSL/TLS by default on its webmail services only towards the end of 2013 [Peterson].
As we learned through the Snowden’s revelations, intelligence agencies have been intercepting and collecting unencrypted traffic at large for many years. There are documented examples of such mass surveillance programs with GCHQ’s TEMPORA and NSA’s XKEYSCORE. Through these programs NSA/GCHQ have been able to swipe large amounts of data including email and instant messaging communications which have been transported by the respective providers in clear for years, unsuspecting of the pervasiveness and scale of governments’ efforts and investment into global mass surveillance capabilities.
However, similar mass interception of unencrypted HTTP communications is also often employed at a nation-level by less democratic countries by exercising control over state-owned Internet Service Providers (ISP) and through the use of commercially available monitoring, collection, and censorship equipment. Over the last few years a lot of information has come to public attention on the role and scale of a surveillance industry dedicated to develop interception gear of different types. We have several records of such equipment being sold and utilized by oppressive regimes in order to monitor entire segments of population especially at times of social and political distress, uncovering massive human rights abuses. For example, in 2013 the group Telecomix revealed that the Syrian regime was making use of BlueCoat products in order to intercept clear-text traffic as well as to enforce censorship of unwanted content [RSF]. Similarly in 2012 it was found that the French Amesys provided the Gaddafi’s government with equipment able to intercept emails, Facebook traffic, and chat messages ad a country level. The use of such systems, especially in the context of the Arab Spring and of civil uprisings against the dictatorships, has caused serious concerns of significant human rights abuses in Libya.
The lack of a secure transport layer over HTTP connections not only exposes the users to interception of the content of their communications, but is more and more commonly abused as a vehicle for active compromises of computers and mobile devices. If an HTTP session travels in clear over the network, any node positioned at any point in the network is able to perform man-in-the-middle attacks and observe, manipulate, and hijack the session and modify the content of the communication in order to trigger unexpected behavior by the application generating the traffic. For example, in the case of a browser the attacker would be able to inject malicious code in order to exploit vulnerabilities in the browser or any of its plugins. Similarly, the attacker would be able to intercept, trojanize, and repackage binary software updates that are very commonly downloaded in clear by applications such as word processors and media players. If the HTTP session would be encrypted, the tampering of the content would not be possible, and these network injection attacks would not be successful.
While traffic manipulation attacks have been long known, documented, and prototyped especially in the context of WiFi and LAN networks, in the last few years we observed an increasing investment into the production and sale of network injection equipment both available commercially as well as deployed at scale by intelligence agencies.
For example we learned from some of the documents provided by Edward Snowden to the press, that the NSA has constructed a global network injection infrastructure, called QUANTUM, able to leverage mass surveillance in order to identify targets of interests and subsequently task man-on-the-side attacks to ultimately compromise a selected device. Among other attacks, NSA makes use of an attack called QUANTUMINSERT [Haagsma] which intercepts and hijacks an unencrypted HTTP communication and forces the requesting browser to redirect to a host controlled by NSA instead of the intended website. Normally, the new destination would be an exploitation service, referred in Snowden documents as FOXACID, which would attempt at executing malicious code in the context of the target’s browser. The Guardian reported in 2013 that NSA has for example been using these techniques to target users of the popular anonymity service Tor [Schneier]. The German NDR reported in 2014 that NSA has also been using its mass surveillance capabilities to identify Tor users at large [Appelbaum].
Recently similar capabilities of Chinese authorities have been reported as well in what has been informally called the “Great Cannon” [Marcak], which raised numerous concerns on the potential curb on human rights and freedom of speech due to the increasing tighter control of Chinese Internet communications and access to information.
Network injection attacks are also made widely available to state actors around the world through the commercialization of similar, smaller scale equipment that can be easily acquired and deployed at a country-wide level. Companies like FinFisher and HackingTeam are known to have network injection gear within their products portfolio, respectively called FinFly ISP and RCS Network Injector [Marquis-Boire]. The technology devised and produced by HackingTeam to perform network traffic manipulation attacks on HTTP communications is even the subject of a patent application in the United States [Googlepatent]. Access to offensive technologies available on the commercial lawful interception market has been largely documented to have lead to human rights abuses and illegitimate surveillance of journalists, human rights defenders, and political activists in many countries around the world. Companies like FinFisher and HackingTeam have been found selling their products to oppressive regimes with little concern for bad human rights records [Collins]. While network injection attacks haven’t been the subject of much attention, they do enable even unskilled attackers to perform silent and very resilient compromises, and unencrypted HTTP remains one of the main vehicles.
The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), specified in [RFC6120], provides a standard for interactive chat messaging, and has evolved to encompass interoperable text, voice, and video chat. The protocol is structured as a federated network of servers, similar to email, where users register with a local server which acts one their behalf to cache and relay messages. This protocol design has many advantages, allowing servers to shield clients from denial of service and other forms of retribution for their expression, and designed to avoid central entities which could control the ability to communicate or assemble using the protocol.
None-the-less, there are plenty of aspects of the protocol design of XMPP which shape the ability for users to communicate freely, and to assembly through the protocol. The protocol also has facets that may stifle speech as users self-censor for fear of surveillance, or find themselves unable to express themselves naturally.
The XMPP specification dictates that clients are identified with a resource (node@domain/home / node@domain/work) to distinguish the conversations to specific devices. While the protocol does not specify that the resource must be exposed by the client’s server to remote users, in practice this has become the default behavior. In doing so, users can be tracked by remote friends and their servers, who are able to monitor presence not just of the user, but of each individual device the user logs in with. This has proven to be misleading to many users, [pidgin] since many clients only expose user level rather than device level presence. Likewise, user invisibility so that communication can occur while users don’t notify all buddies and other servers of their availability is not part of the formal protocol, and has only been added as an extension within the XML stream rather than enforced by the protocol.
The XMPP protocol specifies the standard by which communication of channels may be encrypted, but it does not provide visibility to clients of whether their communications are encrypted on each link. In particular, even when both clients ensure that they have an encrypted connection to their XMPP server to ensure that their local network is unable to read or disrupt the messages they send, the protocol does not provide visibility into the encryption status between the two servers. As such, clients may be subject to selective disruption of communications by an intermediate network which disrupts communications based on keywords found through Deep Packet Inspection. While many operators have commited to only establishing encrypted links from their servers in recognition of this vulnerability, it remains impossible for users to audit this behavior and encrypted connections are not required by the protocol itself [xmppmanifesto].
In particular, section 13.14 of the protocol specification [RFC6120] explicitly acknowledges the existence of a downgrade attack where an adversary controlling an intermediate network can force the inter domain federation between servers to revert to a non-encrypted protocol were selective messages can then be disrupted.
Group chat in the XMPP protocol is defined as an extension within the XML specification of the XMPP protocol (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html). However, it is not encoded or required at a protocol level, and not uniformly implemented by clients.
The design of multi-user chat in the XMPP protocol suffers from extending a protocol that was not designed with assembly of many users in mind. In particular, in the federated protocol provided by XMPP, multi-user communities are implemented with a distinguished ‘owner’, who is granted control over the participants and structure of the conversation.
Multi-user chat rooms are identified by a name specified on a specific server, so that while the overall protocol may be federated, the ability for users to assemble in a given community is moderated by a single server. That server may block the room and prevent assembly unilaterally, even between two users neither of whom trust or use that server directly.
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is a network architecture (defined in [RFC7574]) in which all the participant nodes are equally responsible engaged into the storage and dissemination of information. A P2P network is a logical overlay that lives on top of the physical network, and allows nodes (or “peers”) participating to it to establish contact and exchange information directly from one to each other. The implementation of a P2P network may very widely: it may be structured or unstructured, and it may implement stronger or weaker cryptographic and anonymity properties. While its most common application has traditionally been file-sharing (and other types of content delivery systems), P2P is increasingly becoming a popular architecture for networks and applications that require (or encourage) decentralization. A prime example is Bitcoin (and similar cryptocurrencies), as well as Skype, Spotify and other proprietary multimedia applications.
In a time of heavily centralized online services, peer-to-peer is often seen as an alternative, more democratic, and resistant architecture that displaces structures of control over data and communications and delegates all peers equally to be responsible for the functioning, integrity, and security of the data. While in principle peer-to-peer remains critical to the design and development of future content distribution, messaging, and publishing systems, it poses numerous security and privacy challenges which are mostly delegated to individual developers to recognize, analyze, and solve in each implementation of a given P2P network.
Since content, and in some occasions peer lists, are safeguarded and distributed by its members, P2P networks are prone to what are generally defined as “poisoning attacks”. Poisoning attacks might be directed directly at the data that is being distributed, for example by intentionally corrupting it, or at the index tables used to instruct the peers where to fetch the data, or at routing tables, with the attempt of providing connecting peers with lists of rogue or non-existing peers, with the intention to effectively cause a Denial of Service on the network.
Peer-to-Peer traffic (and BitTorrent in particular) represents a high percentage of global Internet traffic and it has become increasingly popular for Internet Service Providers to perform throttling of customers lines in order to limit bandwidth usage [torrentfreak1] and sometimes probably as an effect of the ongoing conflict between copyright holders and file-sharing communities [wikileaks].
Throttling the peer-to-peer traffic makes some uses of P2P networks ineffective and it might be coupled with stricter inspection of users’ Internet traffic through Deep Packet Inspection techniques which might pose additional security and privacy risks.
One of the fundamental and most problematic issues with traditional peer-to-peer networks is a complete lack of anonymization of its users. For example, in the case of BitTorrent, all peers’ IP addresses are openly available to the other peers. This has lead to an ever-increasing tracking of peer-to-peer and file-sharing users [ars]. As the geographical location of the user is directly exposed, and so could be his identity, the user might become target of additional harassment and attacks, being of physical or legal nature. For example, it is known that in Germany law firms have made extensive use of peer-to-peer and file-sharing tracking systems in order to identify downloaders and initiate legal actions looking for compensations [torrentfreak2].
It is worth noting that there are varieties of P2P networks that implement cryptographic practices and that introduce anonymization of its users. Such implementations proved to be successful in resisting censorship of content, and tracking of the network peers. A primary example is FreeNet [freenet1], a free software application designed to significantly increase the difficulty of users and content identification, and dedicated to foster freedom of speech online [freenet2].
In open-membership P2P networks, a single attacker can pretend to be many participants, typically by creating multiple fake identities of whatever kind the P2P network uses [Douceur]. Attackers can use Sybil attacks to bias choices the P2P network makes collectively toward the attacker’s advantage, e.g., by making it more likely that a particular data item (or some threshold of the replicas or shares of a data item) are assigned to attacker-controlled participants. If the P2P network implements any voting, moderation, or peer review-like functionality, Sybil attacks may be used to “stuff the ballots” toward the attacker’s benefit. Companies and governments can use Sybil attacks on discussion-oriented P2P systems for “astroturfing” or creating the appearance of mass grassroots support for some position where there is none in reality.
Encrypted P2P and Anonymous P2P networks already emerged and provided viable platforms for sharing material, publish content anonymously, and communicate securely [bitmessage]. If adopted at large, well-designed and resistant P2P networks might represent a critical component of a future secure and distributed Internet, enabling freedom of speech and freedom of information at scale.
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a point-to-point connection that enables two computers to communicate over an encrypted tunnel. There are multiple implementations and protocols used in provisioning a VPN, and they generally diversify by encryption protocol or particular requirements, most commonly in proprietary and enterprise solutions. VPNs are used commonly either to enable some devices to communicate through peculiar network configurations, or in order to use some privacy and security properties in order to protect the traffic generated by the end user; or both. VPNs have also become a very popular technology among human rights defenders, dissidents, and journalists worldwide to avoid local illegitimate wiretapping and eventually also to circumvent censorship. Among human rights defenders VPNs are often debated as a potential alternative to Tor or other anonymous networks. Such comparison is misleading, as some of the privacy and security properties of VPNs are often misunderstood by less tech-savvy users, which could ultimately lead to unintended problems.
As VPNs increased in popularity, commercial VPN providers have started growing in business and are very commonly picked by human rights defenders and people at risk, as they are normally provided with an easy-to-use service and sometimes even custom applications to establish the VPN tunnel. Not being able to control the configuration of the network, and even less so the security of the application, assessing the general privacy and security state of common VPNs is very hard. Often such services have been discovered leaking information, and their custom applications have been found flawed. While Tor and similar networks receive a lot of scrutiny from the public and the academic community, commercial or non-commercial VPN networks are way less analyzed and understood, and it might be valuable to establish some standards to guarantee a minimal level of privacy and security to those who need them the most.
One of the common misconception among users of VPNs is the level of anonymity VPN can provide. This sense of anonymity can be betrayed by a number of attacks or misconfigurations of the VPN provider. It is important to remember that, contrarily to Tor and similar systems, VPN was not designed to provide anonymity properties. From a technical point of view, the VPN might leak identifiable information, or might be subject of correlation attacks that could expose the originating address of the connecting user. Most importantly, it is vital to understand that commercial and non-commercial VPN providers are bound by the law of the jurisdiction they reside in or in which their infrastructure is located, and they might be legally forced to turn over data of specific users if legal investigations or intelligence requirements dictate so. In such cases, if the VPN providers retain logs, it is possible that the information of the user is provided to the user’s adversary and leads to his or her identification.
With VPN being point-to-point connections, the service providers are in fact able to observe the original location of the connecting users and they are able to track at what time they started their session and eventually also to which destinations they’re trying to connect to. If the VPN providers retain logs for long enough, they might be forced to turn over the relevant data or they might be otherwise compromised, leading to the same data getting exposed. A clear log retaining policy could be enforced, but considering that countries enforce very different levels of data retention policies, VPN providers should at least be transparent on what information do they store and for how long is being kept.
VPN providers very commonly rely on 3rd parties to provision the infrastructure that is later going to be used to run VPN endpoints. For example, they might rely on external dedicated server hosting providers, or on uplink providers. In those cases, even if the VPN provider itself isn’t retaining any significant logs, the information on the connecting users might be retained by those 3rd parties instead, introducing an additional collection point for the adversary.
Some studies proved that several commercial VPN providers and applications suffer of critical leakage of information through IPv6 due to improper support and configuration [PETS2015VPN]. This is generally caused by a lack of proper configuration of the client’s IPv6 routing tables. Considering that most popular browsers and similar applications have been supporting IPv6 by default, if the host is provided with a functional IPv6 configuration, the traffic that is generated might be leaked if the VPN application isn’t designed to manipulate such traffic properly.
Similarly, VPN services that aren’t handling DNS requests and are not running DNS servers of their own, might be prone to DNS leaking which might not only expose sensitive information on the activity of the user, but could also potentially lead to DNS hijacking attacks and following compromises.
As revelations of mass surveillance have been growing in the press, additional details on attacks on secure Internet communications have come to the public’s attention. Among these, VPN appeared to be a very interesting target for attacks and collection efforts. Some implementations of VPN appear to be particularly vulnerable to identification and collection of key exchanges which, some Snowden documents revealed, are systematically collected and stored for future reference. The ability of an adversary to monitor network connections at many different points over the Internet, can allow them to perform traffic correlation attacks and identify the origin of certain VPN traffic by cross referencing the connection time of the user to the endpoint and the connection time of the endpoint to the final destination. These types of attacks, although very expensive and normally only performed by very resourceful adversaries, have been documented [spiegel] to be already in practice and could completely vanify the use of a VPN and ultimately expose the activity and the identity of a user at risk.
Every Internet user has run into the ‘404 Not Found’ Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) status code when trying, and failing, to access a particular website [Cath]. It is a response status that the server sends to the browser, when the server cannot locate the URL. ‘403 Forbidden’ is another example of this class of code signals that gives users information about what is going on. In the ‘403’ case the server can be reached, but is blocking the request because the user is trying to access content forbidden to them. This can be because the specific user is not allowed access to the content (like a government employee trying to access pornography on a work-computer) or because access is restricted to all users (like social network sites in certain countries). As surveillance and censorship of the Internet is becoming more commonplace, voices were raised at the IETF to introduce a new status code that indicates when something is not available for ‘legal reasons’ (like censorship):
The 451 status code would allow server operators to operate with greater transparency in circumstances where issues of law or public policy affect their operation. This transparency may be beneficial both to these operators and to end-users [Bray].
The status code would be named ‘451’, a reference to Bradbury’s famous novel on censorship
During the IETF meeting in Dallas, there was discussion about the usefulness of ‘451’. The main tension revolved around the lack of an apparent machine-readable technical use of the information. The extent to which ‘451’ is just ‘political theatre’ or whether it has a concrete technical use was heatedly debated. Some argued that ‘the 451 status code is just a status code with a response body’ others said it was problematic because ‘it brings law into the picture’. Again others argued that it would be useful for individuals, or organizations like the ‘Chilling Effects’ project, crawling the web to get an indication of censorship (IETF discussion on ‘451’ – author’s field notes March 2015). There was no outright objection during the Dallas meeting against moving forward on status code ‘451’, and on December 18, 2015 the Internet Engineering Steering Group approved publication of [RFC7725] ‘An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles’. It is now an IETF approved HTTP status code to signal when resource access is denied as a consequence of legal demands [RFC7725].
What is interesting about this particular case is that not only technical arguments but also the status code’s outright potential political use for civil society played a substantial role in shaping the discussion, and the decision to move forward with this technology.
It is however important to note that 451 is not a solution to detect all occasions of censorship. A large swath of Internet filtering occurs in the network rather than the server itself. For these forms of censorship 451 plays a limited role, as the servers will not be able to send the code, because they haven’t received the requests (as is the case with servers with resources blocked by the Chinese Golden shield). Such filtering regimes are unlikely to voluntarily inject a 451 status code. The use of 451 is most likely to apply in the case of cooperative, legal versions of content removal resulting from requests to providers. One can think of content that is removed or blocked for legal reasons, like copyright infringement, gambling laws, child abuse, et cetera. The major use case is thus clearly on the Web server itself, not the network. Large Internet companies and search engines are constantly asked to censor content in various jurisdictions. 451 allows this to be easily discovered, for instance by initiatives like the Lumen Database. In the case of adversarial blocking done by a filtering entity on the network 451 is less useful.
Overall, the strength of 451 lies in its ability to provide transparency by giving the reason for blocking, and giving the end-user the ability to file a complaint. It allows organizations to easily measure censorship in an automated way, and prompts the user to access the content via another path (e.g. TOR, VPNs) when (s)he encounters the 451 status code.
Status code 451 impact human rights by making censorship more transparent and measurable. The status code increases transparency both by signaling the existence of censorship (instead of a much more broad HTTP error message like HTTP status code 404) as well as providing details of the legal restriction, which legal authority is imposing it, and what class of resources it applies to. This empowers the user to seek redress.
On the current Internet, transparency on how packets reach a destination is no longer a given. This is due to the increased presence of firewalls, spam filters, and network address translators networks (NATs) – or middleboxes as these hosts are often called – that make use of higher-layer fields to function [Walfish]. This development is contentious. The debate also unfolded at the IETF, specifically at the Session Protocol Underneath Datagrams (SPUD) Birds of a Feather (BOF) meeting held at the IETF conference in March 2015. The discussion at the BOF focused on questions about adding meta-data, or other information to traffic flows, to enable the sharing of information with middleboxes in that flow. During the sessions two competing arguments were distilled. On the one hand adding additional data would allow for network optimization, and hence improve traffic carriage. On the other hand, there are risks of information leakage and other privacy and security concerns.
Middleboxes, and the protocols guiding them, influence individuals’ ability to communicate online freely and privately. Repeatedly mentioned in the discussion was the danger of censorship that comes with middleboxes, and the IETF’s role to prevent such censorship from happening. Middleboxes are becoming a proxy for the debate on the extent to which commercial interests are a valid reason to undermine the end-to-end principle. The potential for abuse and censoring, and thus ultimately the impact of middleboxes on the Internet as a place of unfiltered, unmonitored freedom of speech, is real. It is impossible to make any definitive statements about the direction the debate on middleboxes will take at the IETF. The opinions expressed in the SPUD BOF and by the various interviewees indicate that a majority of engineers are trying to mitigate the negative effects of middleboxes on freedom of speech, but their ability to act is limited by their larger commercial context that is expanding the use of middleboxes.
Are Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks a legitimate form of online protest protected by the right to freedom of speech and association? Can they be seen as the equivalent to ‘million-(wo)men marches’, or sit-ins? Or are they a threat to freedom of expression and access to information, by limiting access to websites and in certain cases the freedom of speech of others? These questions are crucial in our day and age, where political debates, civil disobedience and other forms of activism are increasingly moving online.
Many individuals, not excluding IETF engineers, have argued that DDoS attacks are fundamentally against freedom of speech. Technically DDoS attacks are when multiple computers overload the bandwidth or resources of a website (or other system) by flooding it with traffic, causing it to temporarily stop being available to users. In their 2010 report Zuckerman et al argue that DDoS attacks are a bad thing because they are increasingly used by governments to attack and silence critics. Their research demonstrates that in many countries independent media outlets and human rights organizations are the victim of DDoS attacks, which are directly or indirectly linked to their governments. These types of attacks are particularly complicated because attribution is difficult, creating a situation in which governments can effectively censor content, while being able to deny involvement in the attacks [Zuckerman]. DDoS attacks can thus stifle freedom of expression, complicate the ability of independent media and human rights organizations to exercise their right to (online) freedom of association, while facilitating the ability of governments to censor dissent. When it comes to comparing DDoS attacks to protests in offline life, it is important to remember that only a limited number of DDoS attacks involved solely willing participants. In most cases, the clients are hacked computers of unrelated parties that have not consented to being part of a DDoS (for exceptions see Operation Abibil [Abibil] or the Iranian Green Movement DDoS [GreenMovement]).
In addition, DDoS attacks are increasingly used as an extortion tactic, with criminals flooding a website – rendering it inaccessible – until the owner pays them a certain amount of money to stop the attack. The costs of mitigating such attacks, either by improving security to prevent them or paying off the attackers, ends up being paid by the consumer.
All of these issues seem to suggest that the IETF should try to ensure that their protocols cannot be used for DDoS attacks. Decreasing the number of vulnerabilities in the network stacks of routers or computers, reducing flaws in HTTPS implementations, and depreciating non-secure HTTP protocols could address this issue. The IETF can clearly play a role in bringing about some of these changes, and has indicated in [RFC7258] its commitment to mitigating ‘pervasive monitoring (…) in the design of IETF protocols, where possible.’ This means the use of encryption should become standard. Effectively, for the web this means standardized use of HTTPS. The IETF could redirect its work such that HTPPS becomes part-and-parcel of its standards. However, next to the various technical trade-offs that this might lead to it is important to consider that DDoS attacks are sometimes seen as a method for exercising freedom of speech.
DDoS although disruptive, and silencing at times, can also enable as protest and speech. Or as Sauter [Sauter] argues: ‘though DDoS as a tactic is still relatively novel, it fits within a centuries- long tradition of breaking laws and disrupting business as usual to make a political point. These actions aren’t simply disruption for disruption’s sake. Rather they serve to help the activist or dissenter to direct the attention of the public through the interpolation of difference into routine.’ (30-31). An often heard argument against DDoS attacks is that you cannot construe it as a means to exercise your right to freedom of speech, when the means used effectively impede the right of the party on the receiving end of the attack to exercise that same right. The problem with this line of argumentation is that it conveniently ignores the fact that online DDoS attacks are often one of the few effective ways for activists to gain the attention of the media, the government or other parties of interest. Simply putting up a website for a cause won’t garner the same amount of attention as directly confronting the issue via the website of the individual or organization at the heart of the issue. The ability of activists to do so should be protected, especially considering the fact that as Sauter (2014:4) explains: ‘Collectively, we have allowed the construction of an entire public sphere, the Internet, which by accidents of evolution and design, has none of the inherent free speech guarantees we have come to expect. Dissenting voices are pushed out of the paths of potential audiences, effectively removing them from the public discourse. There is nowhere online for an activist to stand with her friends and her sign. She might set up a dedicated blog—which may or may not ever be read—but it is much harder for her to stand collectively with others against a corporate giant in the online space.’ Although the Internet is often compared to public space, it is not. Rather the opposite. The Internet is almost entirely owned by private entities. And the IETF plays a crucial role in developing this privatized commercialized Internet.
From a legal and political perspective, the IETF does not have the legitimacy to determine when a DDoS is legitimate (in legal or political terms). It does not have the capability to make this judgment as a matter of public policy and subsequently translate it to code. Nor should the IETF try to do so. From a technical perspective, the difference between a ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ DDoS attack is meaningless because it would be extremely difficult for the IETF to engineer a way to detect that difference. In addition, there is a need for the IETF to be consistent in the face of attacks (an attack is an attack is an attack) to maintain the viability of the network. Arguing that some DDoS attacks should be allowed, based on the motivation of the attackers complicates the work of the IETF. Because it approaches PM regardless of the motivation of the attackers (see [RFC7258]) for reasoning), taking the motivation of the attackers into account for DDoS would indirectly undermine the ability of the IETF to protect the right to privacy because it introduces an element of inconsistency into how the IETF deals with attacks.
David Clark recently published a paper warning that the future of the Internet is in danger. He argues that the private sector control over the Internet is too strong, limiting the myriad of ways in which it can be used [Daedalus], including for freedom of speech. But just because freedom of speech, dissent, and protest are human rights, and DDoS is a potential expression of those rights, doesn’t mean that DDoS in and of itself is a right. To widen the analogy, just because the Internet is a medium through which the right to freedom of expression can be exercised does not make access to the Internet or specific ICTs or NCTs a human right. Uses of DDoS might or might not be legitimate for political reasons, but the IETF has no means or methods to assess this, and in general enabling DDoS would mean a deterioration of the network and thus freedom of expression.
In summation, the IETF cannot be expected to take a moral stance on DDoS attacks, or create protocols to enable some attacks and inhibit others. But what it can do is critically reflect on its role in creating a commercialized Internet without a defacto public space or inherent protections for freedom of speech.
Having established how human rights relate to standards and protocols, a common vocabulary of technical concepts that impact human rights and how these technical concept can be combined to ensure that the Internet remains an enabling environment for human rights means the contours of a model for developing human rights protocol considerations has taken shape. This subsection provides the last step by detailing how the technical concepts identified above relate to human rights, and what questions engineers should ask themselves when developing or improving protocols.
The human rights threats on the Internet come in a myriad of forms. Protocols and standards can harm or enable the right to freedom of expression, right to non-discrimination, right to equal protection, right to participate in cultural life, arts and science, right to freedom of assembly and association, and the right to security. An end-user who is denied access to certain services, data or websites may be unable to disclose vital information about the malpractices of a government or other authority. A person whose communications are monitored may be prevented from exercising their right to freedom of association. In a worst-case scenario, protocols that leak information can lead to physical danger. A realistic example to consider is when opposition leaders in totalitarian regimes are subjected to torture on the basis of information gathered by the regime through information leakage in protocols.
This sections details several ‘common’ threats to human rights, indicating how each of these can lead to human rights violations/harms and present several examples of how these threats to human rights materialize on the Internet. This threat modeling is inspired by [RFC6973] Privacy Considerations for Internet Protocols, which bases itself on security threat analysis. This method is by no means a perfect solution for assessing human rights risks in Internet protocols and systems; it is however the best approach currently available. Certain human rights threats are indirectly considered in Internet protocols as part of the standard privacy and security considerations [RFC3552]. Others suggested are tailored specifically to human rights, and represents considerations not currently considered in other RFCs.
Many threats, enablers and risks are linked to different rights. This is not unsurprising if one takes into account that human rights are interrelated, interdependent and universal. Here however we’re not discussing all human rights because not all human rights are relevant to ICTs in general and protocols and standards in particular. This is by no means an attempt to cherry picks rights, if other rights seem relevant, please contact the authors and/or the hrpc mailinglist.
This section provides guidance for document authors in the form of a questionnaire about a protocol being designed. The questionnaire may be useful at any point in the design process, particularly after document authors have developed a high-level protocol model as described in [RFC4101].
Note that the guidance provided in this section does not recommend specific practices. The range of protocols developed in the IETF is too broad to make recommendations about particular uses of data or how human rights might be balanced against other design goals. However, by carefully considering the answers to each question mentioned under 7.3, document authors should be able to produce a comprehensive analysis that can serve as the basis for discussion of whether the protocol adequately protects against human rights threats. This guidance is meant to help the thought process of a human rights analysis; it does not provide specific directions for how to write a human rights protocol considerations section (following the example set in [RFC6973]).
Does your protocol honor the end-to-end principle?
Impacts:
Did you have a look at the Guidelines in the Privacy Considerations for Internet Protocols [RFC6973] section 7? Does your protocol in any way impact the confidentiality of protocol metadata? Does your protocol countering traffic analysis, or data minimisation?
Impacts:
If your protocol impacts packet handling, does it look at the packet content? Is it making decisions based on the content of the packet? Is the protocol transparent about its decision? Does your protocol prioritize certain content or services over others?
Impacts:
Did you have a look at Guidelines for Writing RFC Text on Security Considerations [RFC3552]?
Impacts:
Does your protocol have text strings that are readable or entered by humans? Does your protocol allow Unicode encoded in UTF-8 only, thereby shifting conversion issues away from individual choices? Did you have a look at [RFC6365]?
Impacts:
Does this protocol introduce new identifiers that might be associated with persons or content? Does your protocol make it apparent or transparent when filtering happens?
Identifiers of content exposed within a protocol might be used to facilitate censorship, as in the case of HTTP in this particular scenario […].
Impacts:
Is your protocol fully documented in a way that it could be easily implemented, improved, build upon and/or further developed. Is there any proprietary code needed for the implementation, running or further development of your protocol?
Impacts:
Does your protocol support heterogeneity by design? Does your protocol allow for multiple types of hardware? Does your protocol allow for multiple types of application protocols?
Impacts:
Did you have a look at the Privacy Considerations for Internet Protocols [RFC6973], especially section 6.1.1 ?
Impacts:
Did you have a look at the Privacy Considerations for Internet Protocols [RFC6973], especially section 6.1.2 ?
Impacts:
Sometimes in the design of websites, web technologies, or web tools, barriers are created that exclude people from using the Web. Is your protocol designed to provide an enabling environment for people with disabilities? It might be relevant to look at the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative for examples and guidance. Is your protocol optimized for low bandwidth and high latency connections? Could your protocol also be developed in a stateless manner?
Impacts:
Does your protocol live up to standards of internationalization? Have you considered localizing your protocol for relevant audiences?
Impacts:
Does your protocol contribute to more centralized points of control? Can your protocol be implemented without one single point of control? If applicable, can your protocol be deployed in a federated manner? What is the potential for discrimination against users of your protocol? How can use of your protocol be used to implicate users?
Impacts:
Is your protocol fault tolerant? Does it degrade gracefully? Do you have a documented way to announce degradation? Do you have measures in place for recovery or partial healing from failure? Is your protocol able to maintain dependability and performance in the face of unanticipated changes or circumstances?
Impacts:
(cf [RFC6973] ) Which information related to identifiers or data is exposed to each other protocol entity (i.e., recipients, intermediaries, and enablers)? Are there ways for protocol implementers to choose to limit the information shared with each entity? Are there operational controls available to limit the information shared with each entity?
What controls or consent mechanisms does the protocol define or require before personal data or identifiers are shared or exposed via the protocol? If no such mechanisms or controls are specified, is it expected that control and consent will be handled outside of the protocol?
Does the protocol provide ways for initiators to share different information with different recipients? If not, are there mechanisms that exist outside of the protocol to provide initiators with such control?
Does the protocol provide ways for initiators to limit which information is shared with intermediaries? If not, are there mechanisms that exist outside of the protocol to provide users with such control? Is it expected that users will have relationships that govern the use of the information (contractual or otherwise) with those who operate these intermediaries?
Does the protocol provide ways for initiators to express individuals’ preferences to recipients or intermediaries with regard to the collection, use, or disclosure of their personal data?
Impacts:
Does your protocol maintain and assure the accuracy of data? Does your protocol maintain and assure the consistency of data? Does your protocol in any way allow for the data to be (intentionally or unintentionally) altered?
Impacts:
Do you have enough measures to confirm the truth of an attribute of a single piece of data or entity? Can the attributes get garbled along the way (see security)? If relevant have you implemented IPsec and other Standard Security Best Practices?
Impacts:
Do your protocols adhere to the principle of non-discrimination? Do your protocols adhere to the principle of content agnosticism? Impacts:
Do your protocols use or depend on proprietary code? Also see ‘Open Standards’ above. Also see ‘Connectivity’ above.
Impacts:
Could your protocol stifle or hinder permissionless innovation in any way? See ‘Connectivity’ above
Impacts:
A special thanks to all members of the hrpc RG who contributed to this draft. The following deserve a special mention:
and Stephane Bortzmeyer, Barry Shein, Joe Hall, and Tim Sammut who made a lot of excellent suggestions, many of which found their way directly into the text. We would also like to thank Molly Sauter, Arturo Filasto, Eleanor Saitta and all others who provided input on the draft or the conceptualization of the idea.
As this document concerns a research document, there are no security considerations.
This document has no actions for IANA.
The discussion list for the IRTF Human Rights Protocol Considerations proposed working group is located at the e-mail address hrpc@ietf.org. Information on the group and information on how to subscribe to the list is at https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/hrpc
Archives of the list can be found at: https://www.irtf.org/mail-archive/web/hrpc/current/index.html
| [RFC6973] | Cooper, A., Tschofenig, H., Aboba, B., Peterson, J., Morris, J., Hansen, M. and R. Smith, "Privacy Considerations for Internet Protocols", RFC 6973, DOI 10.17487/RFC6973, July 2013. |