Internet DRAFT - draft-tenoever-hrpc-research
draft-tenoever-hrpc-research
Human Rights Protocol Considerations Research Group N. ten Oever
Internet-Draft Article19
Intended status: Informational C. Cath
Expires: November 14, 2016 Oxford Internet Institute
May 13, 2016
Research into Human Rights Protocol Considerations
draft-tenoever-hrpc-research-02
Abstract
The increaseing convolution 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
strengthened as a human rights enabling environment [Brown].
This document provides a proposal for a vocabulary to discuss the
relation between human rights and Internet protocols, an overview of
the discussion in technical and academic literature and communities,
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
Status of This Memo
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This Internet-Draft will expire on November 14, 2016.
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Copyright Notice
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document authors. All rights reserved.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Vocabulary used . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Research Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4. Literature and Discussion Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5. Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.1. Data Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.1.1. Discourse analysis of RFCs . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.1.2. Interviews with members of the IETF community during
IETF92 in Dallas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.1.3. Participant observation in Working Groups . . . . . . 14
5.2. Data analysis strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5.2.1. Identifying qualities of technical concepts that
relate to human rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5.2.2. Translation human rights to technical terms . . . . . 16
5.2.3. IPv4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
5.2.4. DNS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
5.2.5. HTTP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
5.2.6. XMPP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
5.2.7. Peer to Peer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
5.2.8. Virtual Private Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
5.2.9. HTTP Status Code 451 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
5.2.10. Middleboxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
5.2.11. DDOS attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
5.3. Model for developing human rights protocol considerations 38
5.3.1. Human rights threats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
5.3.2. Guidelines for human rights considerations . . . . . 39
6. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
8. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
9. Research Group Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
10. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
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10.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
10.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
10.3. URIs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
1. Introduction
"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."
[Berners-Lee]
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 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 Internet's role as
an enabler of human rights. Next to that, the strong commitment to
security [RFC1984] [RFC3365] and privacy [RFC6973] [RFC7258] in the
Internet's architectural design contribute to the strengthening of
the Internet as a human rights enabling 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 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 [CathFloridi].
While the Internet was designed with freedom and openness of
communications as core values, as the scale and the commercialization
of the Internet grew, topics like access, rights and connectivity are
forced to compete with other values. Therefore, important 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 enabling
characteristics could also result in (partial) loss of functionality
and connectivity, and other inherent parts of the Internet's
architecture.
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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.
2. Vocabulary used
In the discussion of human rights and Internet architecture concepts
developed in computer science, networking, law, policy-making and
advocacy are coming together. The same concepts might have a very
different meaning and implications in other areas of expertise. In
order to foster a constructive interdisciplinary debate, and minimize
differences in interpretation, the following glossary is provided.
Accessibility Full Internet Connectivity as described in [RFC4084]
to provide unfettered access to the Internet
The design of protocols, services or implementation that provide
an enabling environment for people with disabilities.
The ability to receive information available on the Internet
Anonymity The condition of an identity being unknown or concealed.
[RFC4949]
Anonymous A state of an individual in which an observer or attacker
cannot identify the individual within a set of other individuals
(the anonymity set). [RFC6973]
Authenticity The fact that the data does indeed come from the source
it claims to come from. (It is strongly linked with Integrity,
see below).
Censorship resistance Methods and measures to prevent Internet
censorship.
Confidentiality The non-disclosure of information to any unintended
person or host or party.
Connectivity The extent to which a device or network is able to
reach other devices or networks to exchange data. The Internet is
the tool for providing global connectivity [RFC1958].
Content-agnosticism Treating network traffic identically regardless
of content.
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Debugging Debugging is a methodical process of finding and reducing
the number of bugs, or defects, or malfunctions in a protocol or
its implementation, thus making it behave as expected. It also
includes analyzing the consequences that might have emanate from
the error. Debugging tends to be harder when various subsystems
are tightly coupled, as changes in one may cause bugs to emerge in
another. [WP-Debugging]
The process through which people troubleshoot a technical issue,
which may include inspection of program source code or device
configurations. Can also include tracing or monitoring packet
flow.
Decentralized Opportunity for implementation or deployment of
standards, protocols or systems without one single point of
control.
End-to-End The principal of extending characteristics of a protocol
or system as far as possible within the system. For example, end-
to-end instant message encryption would conceal communications
from one user's instant messaging application through any
intermediate devices and servers all the way to the recipient's
instant messaging application. If the message was decrypted at
any intermediate point-for example at a service provider-then the
property of end-to-end encryption would not be present.
One of the key architectural guidelines of the Internet is the
end-to-end principle in the papers by Saltzer, Reed, and Clark
[Saltzer] [Clark]. The end-to-end principle was originally
articulated as a question of where best not to put functions in a
communication system. Yet, in the ensuing years, it has evolved
to address concerns of maintaining openness, increasing
reliability and robustness, and preserving the properties of user
choice and ease of new service development as discussed by
Blumenthal and Clark in [Blumenthal]; concerns that were not part
of the original articulation of the end-to-end principle.
[RFC3724]
Federation The possibility of connecting autonomous systems into a
single distributed system.
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
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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,
the heterogeneity principle proposed in [RFC1958] needs to be
supported by design. [FIArch]
Integrity Maintenance and assurance of the accuracy and consistency
of data to ensure it has not been (intentionally or
unintentionally) altered.
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]
Inter-operable A property of a documented standard or protocol which
allows different independent implementations to work with each
other without any restricted negotiation, access or functionality.
Internet Standards as an Arena for Conflict Pursuant to the
principle of constant change, since the function and scope of the
Internet evolves, so does the role of the IETF in developing
standards. Internet standards are adopted on the basis of a
series of criteria, including high technical quality, support by
community consensus, and their overall benefit to the Internet.
The latter calls for an assessment of the interests of all
affected parties and the specifications' impact on the Internet's
users. In this respect, the effective exercise of the human
rights of the Internet users is a relevant consideration that
needs to be appreciated in the standardization process insofar as
it is directly linked to the reliability and core values of the
Internet. [RFC1958] [RFC0226] [RFC3724]
Internationalization (i18n) The practice of making protocols,
standards, and implementations usable in different languages and
scripts. (see Localization)
(cf [RFC6365]) In the IETF, "internationalization" means to add or
improve the handling of non-ASCII text in a protocol. [RFC6365]
A different perspective, more appropriate to protocols that are
designed for global use from the beginning, is the definition used
by W3C:
"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]
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Many protocols that handle text only handle one charset (US-
ASCII), or leave the question of what CCS and encoding 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 (l10n) The practice of translating an implementation to
make it functional in a specific language or for users in a
specific locale (see Internationalization).
(cf [RFC6365]): The process of adapting an internationalized
application platform or application to a specific cultural
environment. In localization, the same semantics are preserved
while the syntax may be changed. [FRAMEWORK]
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.
Open standards Conform [RFC2606]: Various national and international
standards bodies, such as ANSI, ISO, IEEE, and ITU-T, develop a
variety of protocol and service specifications that are similar to
Technical Specifications defined here. National and international
groups also publish "implementors' agreements" that are analogous
to Applicability Statements, capturing a body of implementation-
specific detail concerned with the practical application of their
standards. All of these are considered to be "open external
standards" for the purposes of the Internet Standards Process.
Openness The quality of the unfiltered Internet that allows for free
access to other hosts.
Absence of centralized points of control - a feature that is
assumed to make it easy for new users to join and new uses to
unfold [Brown].
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Permissionless innovation The freedom and ability to freely create
and deploy new protocols on top of the communications constructs
that currently exist.
Privacy The right of an entity (normally a person), acting in its
own behalf, to determine the degree to which it will interact with
its environment, including the degree to which the entity is
willing to share its personal information with others. [RFC4949]
The right of individuals to control or influence what information
related to them may be collected and stored and by whom and to
whom that information may be disclosed.
Privacy is a broad concept relating to the protection of
individual autonomy and the relationship between an individual and
society, including government, companies and private individuals.
It is often summarized as "the right to be left alone" but it
encompasses a wide range of rights including protections from
intrusions into family and home life, control of sexual and
reproductive rights, and communications secrecy. It is commonly
recognized as a core right that underpins human dignity and other
values such as freedom of association and freedom of speech.
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.
Reliable Reliability ensures that a protocol will execute its
function consistently and error resistant as described and
function without unexpected result. A system that is reliable
degenerates gracefully and will have a documented way to announce
degradation. It also has mechanisms to recover from failure
gracefully, and if applicable, allow for partial healing.
Resilience The maintaining of dependability and performance in the
face of unanticipated changes and circumstances.
Robustness The resistance of protocols and their implementations to
errors, and to involuntary, legal or malicious attempts to disrupt
its mode of operations. [RFC0760] [RFC0791] [RFC0793] [RFC1122]
Scalable The ability to handle increased or decreased workloads
predictably within defined expectations. There should be a clear
definition of its scope and applicability. The limits of a
systems scalability should be defined.
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Stateless / stateful In computing, a stateless protocol is a
communications protocol that treats each request as an independent
transaction that is unrelated to any previous request so that the
communication consists of independent pairs of request and
response. A stateless protocol does not require the server to
retain session information or status about each communications
partner for the duration of multiple requests. In contrast, a
protocol which requires keeping of the internal state on the
server is known as a stateful protocol. [WP-Stateless]
Strong encryption / cryptography Used to describe a cryptographic
algorithm that would require a large amount of computational power
to defeat it. [RFC4949]
Transparent "transparency" refers to the original Internet concept
of a single universal logical addressing scheme, and the
mechanisms by which packets may flow from source to destination
essentially unaltered. [RFC2775]
The combination of reliability, confidentiality, integrity,
anonymity, and authenticity is what makes up security on the
Internet.
( Reliability )
( Confidentiality )
( Integrity ) = communication and information security
( Authenticity )
( Anonymity )
The combination of the end-to-end principle, interoperability,
resilience, reliability and robustness are the enableing factors that
result in on the Internet.
( End-to-End )
( Interoperability )
( Resilience )
( Reliability ) = connectivity
( Robustness )
( Autonomy )
( Simplicity )
3. Research Questions
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:
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1. How can Internet protocols and standards impact human rights,
either by enabling them or by creating a restrictive environment?
2. Can guidelines be developed to improve informed and transparent
decision making about potential human rights impact of protocols?
4. Literature and Discussion Review
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 sufficient to
say that the IETF community consistently tries to push back against
the standardization of surveillance and certain other issues that
negatively influence end-users' experience of and trust in the
Internet [Denardis14]. The role human rights play in engineering,
architecture and protocol design is much less clear.
It is very important to understand how protocols and standards impact
human rights. In particular because Standard Setting Organizations
(SDOs) are increasingly becoming venues where social values (like
human rights) are discussed, although often from a technological
point of view. These SDOs are becoming a new focal point for
discussions about values-by-design, and the role of technical
engineers in protecting or enabling human rights [Brownetal]
[Clarketal] {[Denardis14}} [CathFloridi] [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
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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 embedded 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
protocol suite, numerous standards, the Domain Name System (DNS), and
routing protocols - a common public good. This is a different
approach than that of [Clarketal] and [Brownetal] because Broeders
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] represent a fourth position. They argue that
it is to early to make any definitive claims, but that there is a
need for more careful analysis of the impact of protocol design
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choices on human rights. They also 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 is very
complicated as each situation is dependent on its context. At this
point is difficult to say whether hard-coding human rights into
protocols is wise (or feasible). 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 theresearch into human
rights protocol considerations by the HRPC group to clarify the
relation between technical concepts used in the IETF and human
rights. This document sets out some preliminary steps and
considerations for engineers to take into account when developing
standards and protocols.
5. Methodology
Mapping the relation between human rights, protocols and
architectures is a new research challenge, which requires a good
amount of interdisciplinary and cross organizational cooperation to
develop a consistent methodology.
The methodological choices made in this document are based on the
political science-based method of discourse analysis and ethnographic
research methods [Cath]. 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], 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 taken by the research group was
reading RFCs and other official IETF documents. The second step was
the use of a python-based analyzer, using the tool Big Bang, adapted
by Nick Doty [Doty] to scan for the concepts that were identified as
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important architectural principles (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 and processing
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 individuals with extensive experience 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.
5.1. Data Sources
In order to map the potential relation between human rights and
protocols, the HRPC research group gathered data from three specific
sources:
5.1.1. Discourse analysis of RFCs
To start addressing the issue, a mapping exercise analyzing Internet
architecture and protocols features, vis-a-vis their possible impact
on human rights was undertaken. Therefore, research on the language
used in current and historic RFCs and mailing list discussions was
undertaken to expose core architectural principles, language and
deliberations on human rights of those affected by the network.
5.1.2. Interviews with members of the IETF community during IETF92 in
Dallas
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 was done at the Dallas meeting in March 2015.
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To get an insider understanding of how they view the relationship (if
any) between human rights and protocols to play out in their work.
5.1.3. Participant observation in Working Groups
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.
5.2. Data analysis strategies
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 over these strategies some
elaboration on the process of identifying technical concepts as they
relate to human rights needs to be given:
5.2.1. Identifying qualities of technical concepts that relate to human
rights
5.2.1.1. Mapping protocols and standards related to human rights
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 the enabling (or inhibiting)
features 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 closely related to human rights was compiled.
5.2.1.2. Extracting concepts from mapped RFCs
Mapping the protocols and standards that are related to human rights
and create a human rights enabeling environment was the first step.
For that we needed to focus on specific technical concepts that
underlie these protocols and standards. On the basis of this list a
number of technical concepts that appeared frequently was extracted,
and used to create a second list of technical terms that, when
combined, create an enabling environment for excercising human rights
on the Internet.
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5.2.1.3. Building a common vocabulary of technical concepts that impact
human rights
While interviewing experts, 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 and vocabulary, a list of definitions was
created. The definitions are based on the wording found in various
IETF documents, and if these were unavailable definitions were taken
from definitions from other Standards Developing Organizations or
academic literature.
5.2.1.4. Translating Human Rights Concept into Technical Definitions
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 when combined create an enabling
environment for human rights.
5.2.1.5. List technical terms that combined create enabling environment
for human rights
On the basis of the prior steps the following list of technical
terms, that when combined create an enabling environment for human
rights, such a freedom of expression and freedom of association, was
drafted.
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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 = |
= | = |
= | = |
= \------------------------------------------------/
= =
+===============================================+
5.2.2. Translation human rights to technical terms
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 underlie freedom of expression on the
Internet.
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( 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 )
( Accessibility )
( Open standards )
( Localization ) = Right to participate in cultural life,
( Internationalization ) arts and science &
( Censorship resistance ) Right to education
( Accessibility )
( Connectivity )
( Decentralization )
( Censorship resistance ) = Right to freedom of assembly
( Pseudonymity ) and association
( Anonymity )
( Security )
( Reliability )
( Confidentiality )
( Integrity ) = Right to security
( Authenticity )
( Anonymity )
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5.2.2.1. Map cases of protocols that adversely impact human rights or
are enablers thereof
Given the information above, the following list of cases of protocols
that adversely impact or enable human rights was formed.
5.2.3. IPv4
The Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), also known as 'layer 3' of
the Internet, and specified as a common encapsulation and protocol
header, is defined in [RFC0791]. The evolution of Internet
communications led to continued development in this area,
encapsulated in the development of version 6 (IPv6) 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
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 a
robust IP layer. Instead, the protocol limited the deployability of
such extensions by not providing a mechanism for appropriate fallback
behavior when unrecognized extensions are encountered.
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5.2.3.1. Network visibility of Source and Destination
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.
5.2.3.2. Protocols
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 also led to 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]
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5.2.3.3. Address Translation and Mobility
A major structural shift in the Internet which undermined the
protocol design of IPv4, and significantly reduced the freedom of end
users to communicate and assemble is the introduction of 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.
5.2.4. DNS
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 recently been 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 particular rules on hate
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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. An often mentioned example is an application
like .gay.
DNS has significant privacy issues per [RFC7626]. Most notable 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 received a correct, "authoritative", answer to a query. In
response to the privacy issues, the IETF DNS PRIVate Exchange
(DPRIVE) Working Group is developing mechanisms to provide
confidentiality to DNS transactions, to address concerns surrounding
pervasive monitoring [RFC7258].
Authentication through DNSSEC creates a validation path for records.
This authentication protects against forged or manipulated DNS data.
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 is becoming 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. Even though DNSSEC doesn't prevent censorship,
it makes it clear that the returned information is not the
information that was requested, which contributes to the right to
security and increases trust in the network.
5.2.4.1. Removal of records
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 US
government. The same technique has been used in 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.
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5.2.4.2. Distortion of records
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 occurred in Greece [ververis], where
a study found evidence of both of deep packet inspection to distort
DNS replies, and overblocking of content. ISPs prevented clients
from resolving the names of domains which they were instructed to do
through a governmental order, prompting this particular 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 is 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].
5.2.4.3. Injection of records
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 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 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 mentioned above,
injection does not stifle the ability of a server to announce it's
name, it instead provides another voice which answers sooner. This
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is effective because without DNSSEC, the protocol will respond to
whichever answer is received first, without listening for subsequent
answers.
5.2.5. HTTP
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 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 of encryption. Only in the
middle of the 2000s did 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 the encrypted version of
HTTP, HTTPSecure (HTTPS).
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5.2.5.1. Traffic Interception
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, making use of known and unknown weaknesses in
existing protocols [RFC7258]. 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.
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5.2.5.2. Traffic Manipulation
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
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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.
There is a new version of HTTP, called HTTP/2, which was published as
[RFC7540] and which aimed to be largely backwards compatible but also
offer new option such as data compression of HTTP headers and
pipelining of request and multiplexing multiple requests over a
single TCP connection. Except for decreasing latency to improve page
loading speeds it also facilitates more efficient use of connectivity
in low-bandwith environments, which is an enabler for freedom of
expression, the right to assembly, right to political participation
and the right to participate in cultural life, art and science.
[RFC7540] does not mandate Transport Layer Security or any other form
of encryption, is also does not support opportunistic encryption, so
the vulnerabilities listed above for HTTP/1 are also valid for HTTP/2
as defined in [RFC7540].
5.2.6. XMPP
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
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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 freely.
5.2.6.1. User Identification
The XMPP specification dictates that clients are identified with a
resource (node@domain/home [1] / node@domain/work [2]) 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.
5.2.6.2. Surveillance of Communication
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
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domain federation between servers to revert to a non-encrypted
protocol were selective messages can then be disrupted.
5.2.6.3. Group Chat Limitations
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.
5.2.7. Peer to Peer
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
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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.
5.2.7.1. Network Poisoning
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.
5.2.7.2. Throttling
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.
5.2.7.3. Tracking and Identification
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
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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].
5.2.7.4. Sybil Attacks
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.
5.2.7.5. Conclusions
Encrypted P2P and Anonymous P2P networks already emerged and provided
viable platforms for sharing material [tribler], 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.
5.2.8. Virtual Private Network
5.2.8.1. Introduction
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
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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.
5.2.8.2. False sense of Anonymity
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.
5.2.8.3. Logging
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
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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.
5.2.8.4. 3rd Party Hosting
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.
5.2.8.5. IPv6 Leakage
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.
5.2.8.6. DNS Leakage
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.
5.2.8.7. Traffic Correlation
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
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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.
5.2.9. HTTP Status Code 451
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 IETF92 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
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Group approved publication of '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.
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5.2.10. Middleboxes
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.
5.2.11. DDOS attacks
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.
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Many individuals, not excluding IETF engineers, have argued that DDoS
attacks are fundamentally against freedom of speech. Technically
DDoS attacks are when one or multiple host overload the bandwidth or
resources of another host by flooding it with traffic, causing it to
temporarily stop being available to users. One can roughly
differentiate three types of DDoS attacks: Volume Based Attacked
(This attack aims to make the host unreachable by using up all it's
bandwith, often used techniques are: UDP floods and ICMP floods),
Protocol Attacks (This attacks aims to use up actual server
resources, often used techniques are SYN floods, fragmented packet
attacks, and Ping of Death [RFC4949]) and Application Layer Attacks
(this attack aims to bring down a server, such as the webserver).
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
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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
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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.
5.3. Model for developing human rights protocol considerations
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. In short, it
presents a set of human rights protocol considerations.
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5.3.1. Human rights threats
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 or participate in political processes [Penney]. In a
worst-case scenario, protocols that leak information can lead to
physical danger. A realistic example to consider is when opposition
group members (or those identified as such) 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 is
based on the 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 specific human rights threats are indirectly
considered in Internet protocols as part of the security
considerations [RFC3552], but privacy guidelines [RFC6973] or
reviews, let alone human rights impact assessments of protocols are
not standardized or implemented.
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 indivisible. 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
[Bless]. 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.
5.3.2. Guidelines for human rights considerations
This section provides guidance for document authors in the form of a
questionnaire about protocols 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].
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There should be some discussion of potential human rights risks
arising from potential misapplications of the protocol or technology
described in the RFC. This might be coupled with an Applicability
Statement for that RFC.
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 on
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]).
5.3.2.1. Technical concepts as they relate to human rights
5.3.2.1.1. Connectivity
Question(s): Does your protocol add application-specific functions to
intermediary nodes? Could this functionality also be added to end
nodes instead of intermediary nodes?
Explanation: The end-to-end principle [Saltzer] which aims to extend
characteristics of a protocol or system as far as possible within the
system, or in other words 'the intelligence is end to end rather than
hidden in the network' [RFC1958]. Middleboxes (which can be Content
Delivery Networks, Firewalls, NATs or other intermediary nodes that
provide other 'services' than routing), and the protocols guiding
them, influence individuals' ability to communicate online freely and
privately. The potential for abuse and intentional and unintentional
censoring and limiting permissionless innovation, and thus ultimately
the impact of middleboxes on the Internet as a place of unfiltered,
unmonitored freedom of speech, is real.
Example: End-to-end instant message encryption would conceal
communications from one user's instant messaging application through
any intermediate devices and servers all the way to the recipient's
instant messaging application. If the message was decrypted at any
intermediate point-for example at a service provider-then the
property of end-to-end encryption would not be present.
Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
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- Right to freedom of assembly and association
5.3.2.1.2. Privacy
Question(s): Did you have a look at the Guidelines in the Privacy
Considerations for Internet Protocols [RFC6973] section 7? Could
your protocol in any way impact the confidentiality of protocol
metadata? Could your protocol counter traffic analysis, or data
minimization?
Explanation: Privacy refers to the right of an entity (normally a
person), acting in its own behalf, to determine the degree to which
it will interact with its environment, including the degree to which
the entity is willing to share its personal information with others.
[RFC4949].
Example: See [RFC6973]
Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to non-discrimination
5.3.2.1.3. Content agnosticism
Question(s): 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 decisions?
Does your protocol prioritize certain content or services over
others?
Explanation: Content agnosticism refers to the notion that network
traffic is treated identically regardless of content.
Example: Content agnosticism prevents content-based discrimination
against packets. This is important because changes to this principle
can lead to a two-tiered Internet, where certain packets are
prioritized over others on the basis of their content. Effectively
this would mean that although all users are entitled to receive their
packets at a certain speed, some users become more equal than others.
Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to non-discrimination
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- Right to equal protection
5.3.2.1.4. Security
Question(s): Did you have a look at Guidelines for Writing RFC Text
on Security Considerations [RFC3552]? Have you found any attacks
that are out of scope for your protocol? Would these attacks be
pertinent to the human rights enabling features of the Internet (as
descibred throughout this document)?
Explanation: Most people speak of security as if it were a single
monolithic property of a protocol or system, however, upon
reflection; one realizes that it is clearly not true. Rather,
security is a series of related but somewhat independent properties.
Not all of these properties are required for every application. We
can loosely divide security goals into those related to protecting
communications (COMMUNICATION SECURITY, also known as COMSEC) and
those relating to protecting systems (ADMINISTRATIVE SECURITY or
SYSTEM SECURITY). Since communications are carried out by systems
and access to systems is through communications channels, these goals
obviously interlock, but they can also be independently provided
[RFC3552].
Example: See [RFC3552].
Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to freedom of assembly and association
- Right to non discrimination
5.3.2.1.5. Internationalization
Question(s): 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]?
Explanation: Internationalization refers to the practice of making
protocols, standards, and implementations usable in different
languages and scripts. (see Localization). In the IETF,
internationalization means to add or improve the handling of non-
ASCII text in a protocol. [RFC6365] A different perspective, more
appropriate to protocols that are designed for global use from the
beginning, is the definition used by W3C:
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"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 representing users across 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.
Example: See localization Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to political participation
- Right to participate in cultural life, arts and science
- Right to political participation
5.3.2.1.6. Censorship resistance
Question(s): 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? Can your protocol
contribute to filtering in a way it could be implemented to censor
data or services? Could this be designed to ensure this doesn't
happen?
Explanation: Censorship resistance refers to the methods and measures
to prevent Internet censorship.
Example: Identifiers of content exposed within a protocol might be
used to facilitate censorship, as in the case of IP based censorship,
which affects protocols like HTTP. Filtering can be made apparent by
the use of status code 451 - which allows server operators to operate
with greater transparency in circumstances where issues of law or
public policy affect their operation [Bray].
Impacts: - Right to freedom of expression - Right to political
participation - Right to participate in cultural life, arts and
science - Right to freedom of assembly and association
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5.3.2.1.7. Open Standards
Question(s): Is your protocol fully documented in a way that it could
be easily implemented, improved, build upon and/or further developed?
Do you use proprietary code for the implementation, running or
further development of your protocol? Does your protocol favor a
particular proprietary specification over technically equivalent and
competing specification(s), for instance by making any incorporated
vendor specification "required" or "recommended"?
Explanation: The Internet was able to developed into the global
network of networks because of the existence of open, non-proprietary
standards [Zittrain]. They are crucial for enabling
interoperability. Yet, open standards are not explicitly defined
within the IETF. On the subject, [RFC2606] states: Various national
and international standards bodies, such as ANSI, ISO, IEEE, and ITU-
T, develop a variety of protocol and service specifications that are
similar to Technical Specifications defined at the IETF. National
and international groups also publish "implementors' agreements" that
are analogous to Applicability Statements, capturing a body of
implementation-specific detail concerned with the practical
application of their standards. All of these are considered to be
"open external standards" for the purposes of the Internet Standards
Process. Similarly, [RFC3935] does not define open standards but
does emphasize the importance of 'open process': any interested
person can participate in the work, know what is being decided, and
make his or her voice heard on the issue. Part of this principle is
the IETF's commitment to making its documents, WG mailing lists,
attendance lists, and meeting minutes publicly available on the
Internet.
Open standards are important as they allow for permissionless
innovation, which is important to maintain the freedom and ability to
freely create and deploy new protocols on top of the communications
constructs that currently exist. It is at the heart of the Internet
as we know it, and to maintain its fundamentally open nature, we need
to be mindful of the need for developing open standards.
Example: [RFC6108] describes a system for providing critical end-user
notifications to web browsers, which has been deployed by Comcast, an
Internet Service Provider (ISP). Such a notification system is being
used to provide near-immediate notifications to customers, such as to
warn them that their traffic exhibits patterns that are indicative of
malware or virus infection. There are other proprietary systems that
can perform such notifications, but those systems utilize Deep Packet
Inspection (DPI) technology. In contrast to DPI, this document
describes a system that does not rely upon DPI, and is instead based
in open IETF standards and open source applications.
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Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to participate in cultural life, arts and science
5.3.2.1.8. Heterogeneity Support
Question(s): 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? Is your
protocol liberal in what it receives and handles? Will it remain
usable and open if the context changes?
Explanation: 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, the
heterogeneity principle proposed in [RFC1958] needs to be supported
by design [FIArch].
Example: Heterogeneity is inevitable and needs be supported by
design. Multiple types of hardware must be allowed for, e.g.
transmission speeds differing by at least 7 orders of magnitude,
various computer word lengths, and hosts ranging from memory-starved
microprocessors up to massively parallel supercomputers. Multiple
types of application protocol must be allowed for, ranging from the
simplest such as remote login up to the most complex such as
distributed databases [RFC1958].
Impacts: - Right to freedom of expression
5.3.2.1.9. Anonymity
Question(s): Did you have a look at the Privacy Considerations for
Internet Protocols [RFC6973], especially section 6.1.1 ?
Explanation: Anonymity refers to the condition of an identity being
unknown or concealed [RFC4949]. It is an important feature for many
end-users, as it allows them different degrees of privacy online.
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Example: Often standards expose private information, it is important
to consider ways to mitigate the obvious privacy impacts. For
instance, a feature which uses deep packet inspection or geolocation
data could refuse to open this data to third parties, that might be
able to connect the data to a physical person.
Impacts: - Right to non-discrimination - Right to political
participation - Right to freedom of assembly and association - Right
to security
5.3.2.1.10. Pseudonymity
Question(s): Have you considered the Privacy Considerations for
Internet Protocols [RFC6973], especially section 6.1.2 ? Does this
specification collect personally derived data? Does the standard
utilize data that is personally-derived, i.e. derived from the
interaction of a single person, or their device or address? Does
this specification generate personally derived data, and if so how
will that data be handled?
Explanation: Pseudonymity - the ability to disguise one's identity
online - is an important feature for many end-users, as it allows
them different degrees of anonymity and privacy online.
Example: Designing a standard that exposes private information to ??,
it is important to consider ways to mitigate the obvious impacts.
For instance, a feature which uses deep packet inspection or
geolocation data could refuse to open this data to third parties,
that might be able to connect the data to a physical person.
Impacts:
- Right to non-discrimination
- Right to freedom of assembly and association
5.3.2.1.11. Accessibility
Question(s): Is your protocol designed to provide an enabling
environment for people who are not able-bodied? Have you looked 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?
Explanation: The Internet is fundamentally designed to work for all
people, whatever their hardware, software, language, culture,
location, or physical or mental ability. When the Internet meets
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this goal, it is accessible to people with a diverse range of
hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive ability [W3CAccessibility].
Sometimes in the design of protocols, websites, web technologies, or
web tools, barriers are created that exclude people from using the
Web.
Example: The HTML protocol as defined in [RFC1866] specifically
requires that every image must have an alt attribute (with a few
exceptions for HTML5) to ensure images are accessible for people that
cannot themselves decipher non-text content in web pages.
Impacts: - Right to non-discrimination - Right to freedom of assembly
and association - Right to education - Right to political
participation
5.3.2.1.12. Localization
Question(s): Does your protocol uphold the standards of
internationalization? Have made any concrete steps towards
localizing your protocol for relevant audiences?
Explanation: Localization refers to the adaptation of a product,
application or document content to meet the language, cultural and
other requirements of a specific target market (a locale)
[W3Ci18nDef]. It is also described as the practice of translating an
implementation to make it functional in a specific language or for
users in a specific locale (see Internationalization).
Example: The Internet is a global medium, but many of its protocols
and products are developed with a certain audience in mind, that
often share particular characteristics like knowing how to read and
write in ASCII and knowing English. This limits the ability of a
large part of the world's online population from using the Internet
in a way that is culturally and linguistically accessible. An
example of a protocol that has taken into account the view that
individuals like to have access to data in their native language can
be found in [RFC1766]. This protocol labels the information content
with an identifier for the language in which it is written. And this
allows information to be presented in more than one language.
Impacts: - Right to non-discrimination - Right to participate in
cultural life, arts and science - Right to Freedom of Expression
5.3.2.1.13. Decentralization
Question(s): 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
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users of your protocol? How can use of your protocol be used to
implicate users? Does your protocol create additional centralized
points of control?
Explanation: Decentralization is one of the central technical
concepts of the architecture, and embraced as such by the IETF
[RFC3935]. It refers to the absence or minimization of centralized
points of control - a feature that is assumed to make it easy for new
users to join and new uses to unfold {{Brown}. It also reduces issues
surrounding single points of failure, and distributes the network
such that it continues to function if one or several nodes are
disabled. With the commercialization of the Internet in the early
1990's there has been a slow move to move away from decentralization,
to the detriment of the technical benefits of having a decentralized
Internet.
Example: The bits traveling the Internet are increasingly susceptible
to monitoring and censorship, from both governments and Internet
service providers, as well as third (malicious) parties. The ability
to monitor and censor is further enabled by the increased
centralization of the network that creates central infrastructure
points that can be tapped in to. The creation of peer-to-peer
networks and the development of voice-over-IP protocols using peer-
to-peer technology in combination with distributed hash table (DHT)
for scalability are examples of how protocols can preserve
decentralization [Pouwelse].
Impacts: - Right to freedom of assembly and association
5.3.2.1.14. Reliability
Question(s): 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? Can your protocol maintain dependability and performance in
the face of unanticipated changes or circumstances?
Explanation: Reliability ensures that a protocol will execute its
function consistently and error resistant as described, and function
without unexpected result. A system that is reliable degenerates
gracefully and will have a documented way to announce degradation.
It also has mechanisms to recover from failure gracefully, and if
applicable, allow for partial healing. As with confidentiality, the
growth of the Internet and fostering innovation in services depends
on users having confidence and trust [RFC3724] in the network. For
reliability it is necessary that services notify the users if a
delivery fails. In the case of real-time systems in addition to the
reliable delivery the protocol needs to safeguard timeliness.
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Example: In the modern IP stack structure, a reliable transport layer
requires an indication that transport processing has successfully
completed, such as given by TCP's ACK message [RFC0793], and not
simply an indication from the IP layer that the packet arrived.
Similarly, an application layer protocol may require an application-
specific acknowledgement that contains, among other things, a status
code indicating the disposition of the request (See [RFC3724]).
Impacts: - Right to security
5.3.2.1.15. Confidentiality
Question(s): Does this protocol expose information related to
identifiers or data? If so, does it do so to each other protocol
entity (i.e., recipients, intermediaries, and enablers) [RFC6973]?
What options exist for protocol implementers to choose to limit the
information shared with each entity? What operational controls are
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
pieces of 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 prefer
encryption over clear text operation?
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?
Explanation: Confidentiality refers to keeping your data secret from
unintended listeners [RFC3552]. The growth of the Internet depends
on users having confidence that the network protects their private
information [RFC1984].
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Example: Protocols that do not encrypt their payload make the entire
content of the communication available to the idealized attacker
along their path. Following the advice in [RFC3365], most such
protocols have a secure variant that encrypts the payload for
confidentiality, and these secure variants are seeing ever-wider
deployment. A noteworthy exception is DNS [RFC1035], as DNSSEC
[RFC4033]does not have confidentiality as a requirement. This
implies that, in the absence of changes to the protocol as presently
under development in the IETF's DNS Private Exchange (DPRIVE) working
group, all DNS queries and answers generated by the activities of any
protocol are available to the attacker. When store-and-forward
protocols are used (e.g., SMTP [RFC5321]), intermediaries leave this
data subject to observation by an attacker that has compromised these
intermediaries, unless the data is encrypted end-to-end by the
application-layer protocol or the implementation uses an encrypted
store for this data [RFC7624].
Impacts:
- Right to security
5.3.2.1.16. Integrity
Question(s): 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?
Explanation: Integrity refers to the maintenance and assurance of the
accuracy and consistency of data to ensure it has not been
(intentionally or unintentionally) altered.
Example: See authenticity
Impacts:
- Right to security
5.3.2.1.17. Authenticity
Question(s): Do you have sufficient 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, DNSsec, HTTPS and other Standard Security Best
Practices?
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Explanation: Authenticity ensures that data does indeed come from the
source it claims to come from. This is important to prevent attacks
or unauthorized access and use of data.
Example: Authentication of data is important to prevent
vulnerabilities and attacks, like man-in-the-middle-attacks. These
attacks happen when a third party (often for malicious reasons)
intercepts a communication between two parties, inserting themselves
in the middle and posing as both parties. In practice this looks as
follows:
Alice wants to communicate with Bob. Alice sends data to Bob. Niels
intercepts the data sent to Bob. Niels reads and alters the message
to Bob. Bob cannot see the data did not come from Alice but from
Niels. Niels intercepts and alters the communication as it is sent
between Alice and Bob. Niels knows all.
Impacts:
- Right to security
5.3.2.1.18. Acceptability
Question(s): Do your protocols follow the principle of non-
discrimination? Do your protocols follow the principle of content
agnosticism? Does your protocol take into account the needs of
special needs (Internet) groups, like the audio-visually impaired?
Also see availability.
Explanation: The Internet is a global medium. Yet, there continue to
be issues surrounding acceptability - the extent to which standards
are non-discriminatory and relevant to the widest range of end-users
- that need to be resolved. Many standards are not suitable for end-
users who are not-ablebodied, or otherwise restricted in their
ability to access the Internet in its current form (text, data and
English heavy). Development of new standards should consider the
ways in which they exclude or include non-traditional user
communities.
Example: Designing a feature that could make access to websites for
non-able bodied people more difficult.
- Right to education
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to freedom of assembly and association
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5.3.2.1.19. Availability
Question(s): Does your standard favor proprietary specifications over
technically equivalent and competing specification(s) by making any
incorporated vendor specification "required" or "recommended"
[RFC2026]? Does your protocols use proprietary code? Does your
protocol depend on proprietary code? Also see 'Open Standards'
above. Also see 'Connectivity' above.
Explanation: An open, balanced and cooperative approach to developing
technological standards is vital to maintaining the Internet open,
accessible and secure. This will ensure the standards are open and
not subject to restrictive contract terms from the copyright owners.
Availability of standards is a prerequisite to the continued growth
of the Internet, and crucial to continued technological innovation
across the globe.
Example: See Open Standards
Impacts:
- Right to education
5.3.2.1.20. Adaptability
Question(s): Does your protocol impact permissionless innovation?
See 'Connectivity' above.
Explanation: Adaptability is closely interrelated permissionless
innovation, both maintain the freedom and ability to freely create
and deploy new protocols on top of the communications constructs that
currently exist. It is at the heart of the Internet as we know it,
and to maintain its fundamentally open nature, we need to be mindful
of the impact of protocols on maintaining or reducing permissionless
innovation to ensure the Internet can continue to develop.
Example: WebRTC generates audio and/or video data. In order to
ensure that WebRTC can be used in different locations by different
parties it is important that standard Javascript APIs are developed
to support applications from different voice service providers.
Multiple parties will have similar capabilities, in order to ensure
that all parties can build upon existing standards these need to be
adaptable, and allow for permissionless innovation.
Impacts:
- Right to education
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- Freedom of expression
- Freedom of assembly and association
6. Acknowledgements
A special thanks to all members of the hrpc RG who contributed to
this draft. The following deserve a special mention:
- Joana Varon for helping draft the first iteration of the
methodology, previous drafts and the direction of the film Net of
Rights and working on the interviews at IETF92 in Dallas.
- Daniel Kahn Gillmor (dkg) for helping with the first iteration of
the glossary as well as a lot of technical guidance, support and
language suggestions.
- Claudio Guarnieri for writing the first iterations of the case
studies on VPN, HTTP, and Peer to Peer.
- Will Scott for writing the first iterations of the case studies on
DNS, IP, XMPP.
- Avri Doria for proposing writing a glossary in the first place,
help writing the initial proposals and Internet Drafts and
contributing to the glossary.
and Stephane Bortzmeyer, Barry Shein, Joe Hall, Joss Wright, 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, Nathalie Marechal, Eleanor Saitta and all
others who provided input on the draft or the conceptualization of
the idea.
7. Security Considerations
As this document concerns a research document, there are no security
considerations.
8. IANA Considerations
This document has no actions for IANA.
9. Research Group Information
The discussion list for the IRTF Human Rights Protocol Considerations
proposed working group is located at the e-mail address hrpc@ietf.org
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[3]. 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
10. References
10.1. Normative References
[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,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6973>.
10.2. Informative References
[Abbate] Abbate, J., "Inventing the Internet", MIT Press , 2000,
<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/inventing-internet>.
[Abibil] Danchev, D., "Dissecting 'Operation Ababil' - an OSINT
Analysis", 2012, <http://ddanchev.blogspot.be/2012/09/
dissecting-operation-ababil-osint.html>.
[Appelbaum]
Appelbaum, J., Gibson, A., Kabish, V., Kampf, L., and L.
Ryge, "NSA targets the privacy-conscious", 2015,
<http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/aktuell/
nsa230_page-1.html>.
[Babbie] Babbie, E., "The Basics of Social Research", Belmont CA
Cengage , 2010.
[Benkler] Benkler, Y., "The wealth of Networks - How social
production transforms markets and freedom", New Haven and
London - Yale University Press , 2006,
<http://is.gd/rxUpTQ>.
[Berners-Lee]
Berners-Lee, T. and M. Fischetti, "Weaving the Web,",
HarperCollins p 208, 1999.
[Bless] Bless, R. and C. Orwat, "Values and Networks", 2015.
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[Blumenthal]
Blumenthal, M. and D. Clark, "Rethinking the design of the
Internet: The end-to-end arguments vs. the brave new
world", ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Vol. 1,
No. 1, August 2001, pp 70-109. , 2001.
[Bray] Bray, T., "A New HTTP Status Code for Legally-restricted
Resources", 2016, <https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-
httpbis-legally-restricted-status-04>.
[Broeders]
Broeders, D., "The public core of the Internet", WRR ,
2015,
<http://www.wrr.nl/en/publications/publication/article/
de-publieke-kern-van-het-internet-1/>.
[Brown] Brown, I. and M. Ziewitz, "A Prehistory of Internet
Governance", Research Handbook on Governance of the
Internet. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar. , 2013.
[BrownMarsden]
Brown, I. and C. Marsden, "Regulating code", MIT Press ,
2013, <https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/regulating-code>.
[Brownetal]
Brown, I., Clark, D., and D. Trossen, "Should specific
values be embedded in the Internet Architecture?", Sigcomm
, 2010, <http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-
next/2010/Workshops/REARCH/ReArch_papers/10-Brown.pdf>.
[Cath] Cath, C., "A Case Study of Coding Rights: Should Freedom
of Speech Be Instantiated in the Protocols and Standards
Designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force?", 2015,
<https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/hrpc/current/
pdf36GrmRM84S.pdf>.
[CathFloridi]
Cath, C. and L. Floridi, "The Design of the Internet's
Architecture by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
and Human Rights", May 2016.
[Clark] Clark, D., "The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet
Protocols", Proc SIGCOMM 88, ACM CCR Vol 18, Number 4,
August 1988, pp. 106-114. , 1988.
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[Clarketal]
Clark, D., Wroclawski, J., Sollins, K., and R. Braden,
"Tussle in cyberspace - defining tomorrow's Internet", ACM
Digital Library , 2005, <https://dl.acm.org/
citation.cfm?id=1074049>.
[Collins] Collins, K., "Hacking Team's oppressive regimes customer
list revealed in hack", 2015,
<http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-07/06/
hacking-team-spyware-company-hacked>.
[Daedalus]
Clark, D., "The Contingent Internet", Daedalus Winter
2016, Vol. 145, No. 1. p. 9-17 , 2016,
<http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/daed/current>.
[Davidsonetal]
Davidson, A., Morris, J., and R. Courtney, "Strangers in a
strange land", Telecommunications Policy Research
Conference , 2002,
<https://www.cdt.org/files/publications/piais.pdf>.
[Denardis14]
Denardis, L., "The Global War for Internet Governance",
Yale University Press , 2014,
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vkz4n>.
[Denardis15]
Denardis, L., "The Internet Design Tension between
Surveillance and Security", IEEE Annals of the History of
Computing (volume 37-2) , 2015, <http://is.gd/7GAnFy>.
[Denzin] Denzin, N. and Y. Lincoln, "Handbook of Qualitative
Research", Thousand Oaks CA Sage , 2000,
<http://www.amazon.com/SAGE-Handbook-Qualitative-Research-
Handbooks/dp/1412974178>.
[Doty] Doty, N., "Automated text analysis of Requests for Comment
(RFCs)", 2014, <https://github.com/npdoty/rfc-analysis>.
[Douceur] Douceur, J., "The Sybil Attack", 2002,
<http://research.microsoft.com:8082/pubs/74220/
IPTPS2002.pdf>.
[Elahi] Elahi, T. and I. Goldberg, "CORDON - A taxonomy of
Internet Censorship Resistance Strategies", 2012,
<http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/techreports/2012/
cacr2012-33.pdf>.
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[FIArch] "Future Internet Design Principles", January 2012,
<http://www.future-internet.eu/uploads/media/
FIArch_Design_Principles_V1.0.pdf>.
[FRAMEWORK]
ISO/IEC, ., "Information technology - Framework for
internationalization, prepared by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG
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[Geertz] Clifford, G., "Kinship in Bali", Chicago University of
Chicago Press. , 1975,
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bo3625088.html>.
[Googlepatent]
Google, ., "Method and device for network traffic
manipulation", 2012, <https://www.google.com/patents/
EP2601774A1?cl=en>.
[GreenMovement]
Villeneuve, N., "Iran DDoS", 2009,
<https://www.nartv.org/2009/06/16/iran-ddos/>.
[HRC2012] United Nations Human Rights Council, "UN General Assembly
Resolution "The right to privacy in the digital age"
(A/C.3/68/L.45)", 2011,
<http://daccess-ods.un.org/TMP/554342.120885849.html>.
[Haagsma] Haagsma, L., "Deep dive into QUANTUM INSERT", 2015,
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deep-dive-into-quantum-insert/>.
[ICCPR] United Nations General Assembly, "International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights", 1976,
<http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/
CCPR.aspx>.
[ICESCR] United Nations General Assembly, "International Covenant
on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights", 1966,
<http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/
CESCR.aspx>.
[Jabri] Jabri, V., "Discourses on Violence - conflict analysis
reconsidered", Manchester University Press , 1996.
[King] King, C., "Power, Social Violence and Civil Wars",
Washington D.C. United States Institute of Peace Press ,
2007.
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[Lessig] Lessig, L., "Code - And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version
2.0.", New York Basic Books , 2006, <http://codev2.cc/>.
[Marcak] Marcak, B., Weaver, N., Dalek, J., Ensafi, R., Fifield,
D., McKune, S., Rey, A., Scott-Railton, J., Deibert, R.,
and V. Paxson, "China's Great Fire Cannon", 2015,
<https://citizenlab.org/2015/04/chinas-great-cannon/>.
[Marquis-Boire]
Marquis-Boire, M., "Schrodinger's Cat Video and the Death
of Clear-Text", 2014, <https://citizenlab.org/2014/08/cat-
video-and-the-death-of-clear-text/>.
[Mueller] Mueller, M., "Networks and States", MIT Press , 2010,
<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/networks-and-states>.
[Musiani] Musiani, F., "Giants, Dwarfs and Decentralized
Alternatives to Internet-based Services - An Issue of
Internet Governance", Westminister Papers in Communication
and Culture , 2015, <http://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.214>.
[NETmundial]
NETmundial, "NETmundial Multistakeholder Statement", 2014,
<http://netmundial.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/
NETmundial-Multistakeholder-Document.pdf>.
[PETS2015VPN]
Pera, V., Barbera, M., Tyson, G., Haddadi, H., and A. Mei,
"A Glance through the VPN Looking Glass", 2015,
<http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~hamed/papers/
PETS2015VPN.pdf>.
[Penney] Penney, J., "Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and
Wikipedia Use", 2016, <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/
papers.cfm?abstract_id=2769645>.
[Peterson]
Peterson, A., Gellman, B., and A. Soltani, "Yahoo to make
SSL encryption the default for Webmail users. Finally.",
2013, <http://gmailblog.blogspot.de/2010/01/
default-https-access-for-gmail.html>.
[Pouwelse]
Pouwelse, Ed, J., "Media without censorship", 2012,
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pouwelse-censorfree-
scenarios>.
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[RFC0226] Karp, P., "Standardization of host mnemonics", RFC 226,
DOI 10.17487/RFC0226, September 1971,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc226>.
[RFC0760] Postel, J., "DoD standard Internet Protocol", RFC 760, DOI
10.17487/RFC0760, January 1980,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc760>.
[RFC0791] Postel, J., "Internet Protocol", STD 5, RFC 791, DOI
10.17487/RFC0791, September 1981,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc791>.
[RFC0793] Postel, J., "Transmission Control Protocol", STD 7, RFC
793, DOI 10.17487/RFC0793, September 1981,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc793>.
[RFC0894] Hornig, C., "A Standard for the Transmission of IP
Datagrams over Ethernet Networks", STD 41, RFC 894, DOI
10.17487/RFC0894, April 1984,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc894>.
[RFC1035] Mockapetris, P., "Domain names - implementation and
specification", STD 13, RFC 1035, DOI 10.17487/RFC1035,
November 1987, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1035>.
[RFC1122] Braden, R., Ed., "Requirements for Internet Hosts -
Communication Layers", STD 3, RFC 1122, DOI 10.17487/
RFC1122, October 1989,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1122>.
[RFC1631] Egevang, K. and P. Francis, "The IP Network Address
Translator (NAT)", RFC 1631, DOI 10.17487/RFC1631, May
1994, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1631>.
[RFC1766] Alvestrand, H., "Tags for the Identification of
Languages", RFC 1766, DOI 10.17487/RFC1766, March 1995,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1766>.
[RFC1866] Berners-Lee, T. and D. Connolly, "Hypertext Markup
Language - 2.0", RFC 1866, DOI 10.17487/RFC1866, November
1995, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1866>.
[RFC1958] Carpenter, B., Ed., "Architectural Principles of the
Internet", RFC 1958, DOI 10.17487/RFC1958, June 1996,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1958>.
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[RFC1984] IAB and IESG, "IAB and IESG Statement on Cryptographic
Technology and the Internet", BCP 200, RFC 1984, DOI
10.17487/RFC1984, August 1996,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1984>.
[RFC2026] Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision
3", BCP 9, RFC 2026, DOI 10.17487/RFC2026, October 1996,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2026>.
[RFC2277] Alvestrand, H., "IETF Policy on Character Sets and
Languages", BCP 18, RFC 2277, DOI 10.17487/RFC2277,
January 1998, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2277>.
[RFC2460] Deering, S. and R. Hinden, "Internet Protocol, Version 6
(IPv6) Specification", RFC 2460, DOI 10.17487/RFC2460,
December 1998, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2460>.
[RFC2606] Eastlake 3rd, D. and A. Panitz, "Reserved Top Level DNS
Names", BCP 32, RFC 2606, DOI 10.17487/RFC2606, June 1999,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2606>.
[RFC2775] Carpenter, B., "Internet Transparency", RFC 2775, DOI
10.17487/RFC2775, February 2000,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2775>.
[RFC3365] Schiller, J., "Strong Security Requirements for Internet
Engineering Task Force Standard Protocols", BCP 61, RFC
3365, DOI 10.17487/RFC3365, August 2002,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3365>.
[RFC3552] Rescorla, E. and B. Korver, "Guidelines for Writing RFC
Text on Security Considerations", BCP 72, RFC 3552, DOI
10.17487/RFC3552, July 2003,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3552>.
[RFC3724] Kempf, J., Ed., Austein, R., Ed., and IAB, "The Rise of
the Middle and the Future of End-to-End: Reflections on
the Evolution of the Internet Architecture", RFC 3724, DOI
10.17487/RFC3724, March 2004,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3724>.
[RFC3935] Alvestrand, H., "A Mission Statement for the IETF", BCP
95, RFC 3935, DOI 10.17487/RFC3935, October 2004,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3935>.
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[RFC4033] Arends, R., Austein, R., Larson, M., Massey, D., and S.
Rose, "DNS Security Introduction and Requirements", RFC
4033, DOI 10.17487/RFC4033, March 2005,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4033>.
[RFC4084] Klensin, J., "Terminology for Describing Internet
Connectivity", BCP 104, RFC 4084, DOI 10.17487/RFC4084,
May 2005, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4084>.
[RFC4101] Rescorla, E. and IAB, "Writing Protocol Models", RFC 4101,
DOI 10.17487/RFC4101, June 2005,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4101>.
[RFC4303] Kent, S., "IP Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP)", RFC
4303, DOI 10.17487/RFC4303, December 2005,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4303>.
[RFC4906] Martini, L., Ed., Rosen, E., Ed., and N. El-Aawar, Ed.,
"Transport of Layer 2 Frames Over MPLS", RFC 4906, DOI
10.17487/RFC4906, June 2007,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4906>.
[RFC4949] Shirey, R., "Internet Security Glossary, Version 2", FYI
36, RFC 4949, DOI 10.17487/RFC4949, August 2007,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4949>.
[RFC5321] Klensin, J., "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", RFC 5321,
DOI 10.17487/RFC5321, October 2008,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5321>.
[RFC5944] Perkins, C., Ed., "IP Mobility Support for IPv4, Revised",
RFC 5944, DOI 10.17487/RFC5944, November 2010,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5944>.
[RFC6108] Chung, C., Kasyanov, A., Livingood, J., Mody, N., and B.
Van Lieu, "Comcast's Web Notification System Design", RFC
6108, DOI 10.17487/RFC6108, February 2011,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6108>.
[RFC6120] Saint-Andre, P., "Extensible Messaging and Presence
Protocol (XMPP): Core", RFC 6120, DOI 10.17487/RFC6120,
March 2011, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6120>.
[RFC6365] Hoffman, P. and J. Klensin, "Terminology Used in
Internationalization in the IETF", BCP 166, RFC 6365, DOI
10.17487/RFC6365, September 2011,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6365>.
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[RFC7258] Farrell, S. and H. Tschofenig, "Pervasive Monitoring Is an
Attack", BCP 188, RFC 7258, DOI 10.17487/RFC7258, May
2014, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7258>.
[RFC7540] Belshe, M., Peon, R., and M. Thomson, Ed., "Hypertext
Transfer Protocol Version 2 (HTTP/2)", RFC 7540, DOI
10.17487/RFC7540, May 2015,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7540>.
[RFC7574] Bakker, A., Petrocco, R., and V. Grishchenko, "Peer-to-
Peer Streaming Peer Protocol (PPSPP)", RFC 7574, DOI
10.17487/RFC7574, July 2015,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7574>.
[RFC7624] Barnes, R., Schneier, B., Jennings, C., Hardie, T.,
Trammell, B., Huitema, C., and D. Borkmann,
"Confidentiality in the Face of Pervasive Surveillance: A
Threat Model and Problem Statement", RFC 7624, DOI
10.17487/RFC7624, August 2015,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7624>.
[RFC7626] Bortzmeyer, S., "DNS Privacy Considerations", RFC 7626,
DOI 10.17487/RFC7626, August 2015,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7626>.
[RFC7725] Bray, T., "An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles",
RFC 7725, DOI 10.17487/RFC7725, February 2016,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7725>.
[RSF] RSF, "Syria using 34 Blue Coat Servers to spy on Internet
users", 2013, <https://en.rsf.org/syria-syria-using-34-
blue-coat-servers-23-05-2013,44664.html>.
[Rachovitsa]
Rachovitsa, A., "Engineering "Privacy by Design" in the
Internet Protocols - Understanding Online Privacy both as
a Technical and a Human Rights Issue in the Face of
Pervasive Monitoring", International Journal of Law and
Information Technology , 2015, <https://www.ietf.org/mail-
archive/web/hrpc/current/pdfRBnRYFeVsm.pdf>.
[Richie] Richie, J. and J. Lewis, "Qualitative Research Practice -
A Guide for Social Science Students and Researchers",
London Sage , 2003, <http://www.amazon.co.uk/
Qualitative-Research-Practice-Students-Researchers/
dp/0761971106>.
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[Rideout] Rideout, A., "Making security easier", 2008,
<http://gmailblog.blogspot.de/2008/07/
making-security-easier.html>.
[Saltzer] Saltzer, J., Reed, D., and D. Clark, "End-to-End Arguments
in System Design", ACM TOCS, Vol 2, Number 4, November
1984, pp 277-288. , 1984.
[Sauter] Sauter, M., "The Coming Swarm", Bloomsbury, London , 2014.
[Schillace]
Schillace, S., "Default https access for Gmail", 2010,
<http://gmailblog.blogspot.de/2010/01/
default-https-access-for-gmail.html>.
[Schneier]
Schneier, B., "Attacking Tor - how the NSA targets users'
online anonymity", 2013,
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/
tor-attacks-nsa-users-online-anonymity>.
[Schroeder]
Schroeder, I. and B. Schmidt, "Introduction - Violent
Imaginaries and Violent Practice", London and New York
Routledge , 2001, <http://resourcelists.st-
andrews.ac.uk/items/
BFC20363-67B0-B3EF-EA48-13E5230E7899.html>.
[UDHR] United Nations General Assembly, "The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights", 1948,
<http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/>.
[UNGA2013]
United Nations General Assembly, "UN General Assembly
Resolution "The right to privacy in the digital age"
(A/C.3/68/L.45)", 2013,
<http://daccess-ods.un.org/TMP/1133732.05065727.html>.
[W3CAccessibility]
W3C, "Accessibility", 2015,
<https://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/accessibility>.
[W3Ci18nDef]
W3C, "Localization vs. Internationalization", 2010,
<http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-i18n.en>.
ten Oever & Cath Expires November 14, 2016 [Page 63]
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[WP-Debugging]
"Debugging", n.d., <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Debugging>.
[WP-Stateless]
"Stateless protocol", n.d.,
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateless_protocol>.
[Walfish] Walfish, M., Stribling, J., Krohn, M., Balakrishnan, H.,
Morris, R., and S. Shenker, "Middleboxes No Longer
Considered Harmful", 2004, <http://nms.csail.mit.edu/doa>.
[Zittrain]
Zittrain, J., "The Future of the Internet - And How to
Stop It", Yale University Press , 2008,
<https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4455262/
Zittrain_Future%20of%20the%20Internet.pdf?sequence=1>.
[Zuckerman]
Zuckerman, E., Roberts, H., McGrady, R., York, J., and J.
Palfrey, "Report on Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
Attacks", The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at
Harvard University , 2010,
<https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/
cyber.law.harvard.edu/
files/2010_DDoS_Attacks_Human_Rights_and_Media.pdf>.
[ars] Anderson, N., "P2P researchers - use a blocklist or you
will be tracked... 100% of the time", 2007,
<http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/10/p2p-
researchers-use-a-blocklist-or-you-will-be-tracked-100-of-
the-time/>.
[bbc-wikileaks]
BBC, "Whistle-blower site taken offline", 2008,
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7250916.stm>.
[bitmessage]
Bitmessage, "Bitmessage Wiki?", 2014,
<https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page>.
[caida] Dainotti, A., Squarcella, C., Aben, E., Claffy, K.,
Chiesa, M., Russo, M., and A. Pescape, "Analysis of
Country-wide Internet Outages Caused by Censorship", 2013,
<http://www.caida.org/publications/papers/2014/
outages_censorship/outages_censorship.pdf>.
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[freenet1]
Freenet, "What is Freenet?", n.d.,
<https://freenetproject.org/whatis.html>.
[freenet2]
Ian Clarke, ., "The Philosphy behind Freenet?", n.d.,
<https://freenetproject.org/philosophy.html>.
[greatfirewall]
Anonymous, ., "Towards a Comprehensive Picture of the
Great Firewall's DNS Censorship", 2014,
<https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/foci14/
foci14-anonymous.pdf>.
[hall] Hall, J., Aaron, M., and B. Jones, "A Survey of Worldwide
Censorship Techniques", 2015,
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hall-censorship-tech-
01>.
[namecoin]
Namecoin, "Namecoin - Decentralized secure names", 2015,
<https://namecoin.info/>.
[natusage]
Maier, G., Schneider, F., and A. Feldmann, "NAT usage in
Residential Broadband networks", 2011,
<http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/
NATusage11.pdf>.
[pidgin] js, . and Pidgin Developers, "-XMPP- Invisible mode
violating standard", July 2015,
<https://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4322>.
[quic] The Chromium Project, "QUIC, a multiplexed stream
transport over UDP", 2014, <https://www.chromium.org/
quic>.
[spdy] The Chromium Project, "SPDY - An experimental protocol for
a faster web", 2009, <https://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-
whitepaper>.
[spiegel] SPIEGEL, "Prying Eyes - Inside the NSA's War on Internet
Security", 2014,
<http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/
inside-the-nsa-s-war-on-internet-security-a-1010361.html>.
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[techyum] Violet, ., "Official - vb.ly Link Shortener Seized by
Libyan Government", 2010, <http://techyum.com/2010/10/
official-vb-ly-link-shortener-seized-by-libyan-
government/>.
[torproject]
The Tor Project, ., "Tor Project - Anonymity Online",
2007, <https://www.torproject.org/>.
[torrentfreak1]
Van der Sar, E., "Proposal for research on human rights
protocol considerations", 2015, <https://torrentfreak.com/
is-your-isp-messing-with-bittorrent-traffic-find-out-
140123/>.
[torrentfreak2]
Andy, ., "LAWYERS SENT 109,000 PIRACY THREATS IN GERMANY
DURING 2013", 2014, <https://torrentfreak.com/lawyers-
sent-109000-piracy-threats-in-germany-during-
2013-140304/>.
[tribler] Delft University of Technology, Department EWI/PDS/
Tribler, "About Tribler", 2013, <https://www.tribler.org/
about.html>.
[turkey] Akguel, M. and M. Kirlidoğ, "Internet censorship in
Turkey", 2015,
<http://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/
internet-censorship-turkey>.
[ververis]
Vasilis, V., Kargiotakis, G., Filasto, A., Fabian, B., and
A. Alexandros, "Understanding Internet Censorship Policy -
The Case of Greece", 2015,
<https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/foci15/
foci15-paper-ververis-update.pdf>.
[wikileaks]
Sladek, T. and E. Broese, "Market Survey : Detection &
Filtering Solutions to Identify File Transfer of Copyright
Protected Content for Warner Bros. and movielabs", 2011,
<https://wikileaks.org/sony/docs/05/docs/Anti-Piracy/CDSA/
EANTC-Survey-1.5-unsecured.pdf>.
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[xmppmanifesto]
Saint-Andre, P. and . XMPP Operators, "A Public Statement
Regarding Ubiquitous Encryption on the XMPP Network",
2014,
<https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stpeter/manifesto/
master/manifesto.txt>.
10.3. URIs
[1] mailto:node@domain/home
[2] mailto:node@domain/work
[3] mailto:hrpc@ietf.org
Authors' Addresses
Niels ten Oever
Article19
EMail: niels@article19.org
Corinne Cath
Oxford Internet Institute
EMail: corinnecath@gmail.com
ten Oever & Cath Expires November 14, 2016 [Page 67]
