Leaked documents suggest a United Nations telecommunications agency is drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous.
The documents, seen by ZDNet.co.uk's sister site CNET News.com, indicate that the US National Security Agency is also participating in the 'IP Traceback' drafting group, named Q6/17, which is meeting next week in Geneva to work on the traceback proposal. Members of Q6/17 have declined to release key documents, and meetings are closed to the public.
The potential for eroding internet users' right to remain anonymous, which is recognised in international law by groups such as the Council of Europe and protected by law in the US, has alarmed some technologists and privacy advocates. Also affected may be services such as the Tor anonymising network.
"What's distressing is that it doesn't appear that there's been any real consideration of how this type of capability could be misused," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC. "That's really a human rights concern."
Nearly everyone agrees that there are, at least in some circumstances, legitimate security reasons to uncover the source of internet communications. The most common justification for tracebacks is to counter distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks.
But implementation details are important, and governments participating in the process — organised by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN agency — may have their own agendas. A document submitted by China this spring and obtained by ZDNet.co.uk's sister site, CNET News.com, said the "IP traceback mechanism is required to be adapted to various network environments, such as different addressing (IPv4 and IPv6), different access methods (wire and wireless) and different access technologies (ADSL, cable, Ethernet) and etc". It adds: "To ensure traceability, essential information of the originator should be logged."
The Chinese author of the document, Huirong Tian, did not respond to repeated interview requests. Neither did Jiayong Chen of China's state-owned ZTE Corporation, the vice chairman of the Q6/17's parent group who suggested in an April 2007 meeting that it address IP traceback.
A second, apparently leaked ITU document offers surveillance and monitoring justifications that seem well-suited to repressive regimes: "A political opponent to a government publishes articles putting the government in an unfavourable light. The government, having a law against any opposition, tries to identify the source of the negative articles but the articles having been published via a proxy server, is unable to do so protecting the anonymity of the author."
That document was provided to Steve Bellovin, a well-known Columbia University computer scientist, Internet Engineering Steering Group member and Internet Engineering Task Force participant who wrote a traceback proposal eight years ago. Bellovin says he received the ITU document as part of a ZIP file from someone he knows and trusts, and subsequently confirmed its authenticity through a second source. (An ITU representative disputed its authenticity but refused to make public the Q6/17 documents, including a ZIP file describing traceback requirements posted on the agency's password-protected website.)
Bellovin said in a blog post this week that "institutionalising a means for governments to quash their opposition is in direct contravention" of the UN's own Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He said that traceback is no longer that useful a concept, on the grounds that few attacks use spoofed addresses, there are too many sources in a DDoS attack to be useful, and the source computer inevitably would prove to be hacked into anyway.
Another technologist, Jacob Appelbaum, one of the developers of the Tor anonymity system, was also alarmed. "The technical nature of this 'feature' is such a beast that it cannot and will not see the light of day on the internet," Appelbaum said. "If such a system was deployed, it would be heavily abused by precisely those people that it would supposedly trace. No blackhat would ever be caught by this."
Adding to speculation about where the UN agency is heading are indications that some members would like to curb internet anonymity more broadly:
- An ITU network security meeting a few years ago concluded that anonymity should not be permitted. The summary said: "Anonymity was considered as an important problem on the internet (may lead to criminality). Privacy is required but we should make sure that it is provided by pseudonymity rather than anonymity."
- A presentation in July from Korea's Heung-youl Youm said groups such as the IETF should be "required to develop standards or guidelines" that could "facilitate tracing the source of an attacker including IP-level traceback, application-level traceback, user-level traceback". Another Korean proposal — which has not been made public — says all internet providers "should have procedures to assist in the lawful trace-back of security incidents".
- An early ITU proposal from RAD Data Communications in Israel said: "Traceability means that all future networks should enable source traceback, while accountability signifies the responsibility of account providers to demand some reasonable form of identification before granting access to network resources (similar to what banks do before opening a bank accounts)."
Multinational push to curb anonymous speech
By itself, of course, the UN has no power to impose internet standards on anyone. But UN and ITU officials have been lobbying for more influence over the way the internet is managed, most prominently through the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia and a follow-up series of meetings.
The official charter of the ITU's Q6/17 group says that it will work "in collaboration" with the IETF and the US Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center, which could provide a path toward widespread adoption — especially if national governments end up embracing the idea.
Patrick Bomgardner, the NSA's chief of public and media affairs, told CNET News.com on Thursday that "we have no information to provide on this issue". He would not say why the NSA...
