GSM eavesdropping

[Nicolas Williams]

On Mon, Aug 02, 2010 at 12:32:23PM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> Looking forward, the "there should be one mode, and it should be
> secure" philosophy would claim that there should be no insecure
> mode for a protocol. Of course, virtually all protocols we use right
> now had their origins in the days of the Crypto Wars (in which case,
> we often added too many knobs) or before (in the days when people
> assumed no crypto at all) and thus come in encrypted and unencrypted
> varieties of all sorts.
> 
> For example, in the internet space, we have http, smtp, imap and other
> protocols in both plain and ssl flavors. [...]

Well, to be fair, there is much content to be accessed insecurely for
the simple reason that there may be no way to authenticate a peer.  For
much of the web this is the case.

For example, if I'm listening to music on an Internet radio station, I
could care less about authenticating the server (unless it needs to
authenticate me, in which case I'll want mutual authentication).  Same
thing if I'm reading a randmon blog entry or a random news story.

By analogy to the off-line world, we authenticate business partners, but
in asymmetric broadcast-type media, authentication is very weak and only
of the broadcaster to the receiver.  If we authenticate broadcasters at
all, we do it by such weak methods as recognizing logos, broadcast
frequencies, etcetera.

In other words, context matters.  And the user has to understand the
context.  This also means that the UI matters.  I hate to demand any
expertise of the user, but it seems unavoidable.  By analogy to the
off-line world, con-jobs happen, and they happen because victims are
naive, inexperienced, ill, senile, etcetera.  We can no more protect the
innocent at all times online as off, not without their help.

"There should be one mode, and it should be secure" is a good idea, but
it's not as universally applicable as one might like.  *sadness*

SMTP and IMAP, then, definitely require secure modes.  So does LDAP,
even though it's used to access -mostly- public data, and so is more
like broadcast media.  NNTP must not even bother with a secure mode ;)

Another problem you might add to the list is tunneling.  Firewalls have
led us to build every app as a web or HTTP application, and to tunnel
all the others over port 80.  This makes the relevant context harder, if
not impossible to resolve without the user's help.

HTTP, sadly, needs an insecure mode.

Nico
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