draft-iab-privsec-confidentiality-threat-07.txt

Network Working Group                                          R. Barnes
Internet-Draft
Intended status: Informational                               B. Schneier
Expires: November 29, 2015
                                                             C. Jennings

                                                               T. Hardie

                                                             B. Trammell

                                                              C. Huitema

                                                             D. Borkmann

                                                            May 28, 2015


 Confidentiality in the Face of Pervasive Surveillance: A Threat Model
                         and Problem Statement
              draft-iab-privsec-confidentiality-threat-07

Abstract

   Since the initial revelations of pervasive surveillance in 2013,
   several classes of attacks on Internet communications have been
   discovered.  In this document we develop a threat model that
   describes these attacks on Internet confidentiality.  We assume an
   attacker that is interested in undetected, indiscriminate
   eavesdropping.  The threat model is based on published, verified
   attacks.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
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   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on November 29, 2015.




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Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2015 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
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   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   2.  Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  An Idealized Passive Pervasive Attacker . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     3.1.  Information subject to direct observation . . . . . . . .   6
     3.2.  Information useful for inference  . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     3.3.  An illustration of an ideal passive pervasive attack  . .   7
       3.3.1.  Analysis of IP headers  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
       3.3.2.  Correlation of IP addresses to user identities  . . .   8
       3.3.3.  Monitoring messaging clients for IP address
               correlation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
       3.3.4.  Retrieving IP addresses from mail headers . . . . . .   9
       3.3.5.  Tracking address usage with web cookies . . . . . . .   9
       3.3.6.  Graph-based approaches to address correlation . . . .  10
       3.3.7.  Tracking of Link Layer Identifiers  . . . . . . . . .  10
   4.  Reported Instances of Large-Scale Attacks . . . . . . . . . .  11
   5.  Threat Model  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13
     5.1.  Attacker Capabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  14
     5.2.  Attacker Costs  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
   6.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  19
   7.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  19
   8.  IAB Members at the Time of Approval . . . . . . . . . . . . .  20
   9.  Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  20
   10. References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  20
     10.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  20
     10.2.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  20
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  23








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1.  Introduction

   Starting in June 2013, documents released to the press by Edward
   Snowden have revealed several operations undertaken by intelligence
   agencies to exploit Internet communications for intelligence
   purposes.  These attacks were largely based on protocol
   vulnerabilities that were already known to exist.  The attacks were
   nonetheless striking in their pervasive nature, both in terms of the
   volume of Internet traffic targeted, and in terms of the diversity of
   attack techniques employed.

   To ensure that the Internet can be trusted by users, it is necessary
   for the Internet technical community to address the vulnerabilities
   exploited in these attacks [RFC7258].  The goal of this document is
   to describe more precisely the threats posed by these pervasive
   attacks, and based on those threats, lay out the problems that need
   to be solved in order to secure the Internet in the face of those
   threats.

   The remainder of this document is structured as follows.  In
   Section 3, we describe an idealized passive pervasive attacker, one
   which could completely undetectably compromise communications at
   Internet scale.  In Section 4, we provide a brief summary of some
   attacks that have been disclosed, and use these to expand the assumed
   capabilities of our idealized attacker.  Note that we do not attempt
   to describe all possible attacks, but focus on those which result in
   undetected eavesdropping.  Section 5 describes a threat model based
   on these attacks, focusing on classes of attack that have not been a
   focus of Internet engineering to date.

2.  Terminology

   This document makes extensive use of standard security and privacy
   terminology; see [RFC4949] and [RFC6973].  Terms used from [RFC6973]
   include Eavesdropper, Observer, Initiator, Intermediary, Recipient,
   Attack (in a privacy context), Correlation, Fingerprint, Traffic
   Analysis, and Identifiability (and related terms).  In addition, we
   use a few terms that are specific to the attacks discussed in this
   document.  Note especially that "passive" and "active" below do not
   refer to the effort used to mount the attack; a "passive attack" is
   any attack that accesses a flow but does not modify it, while an
   "active attack" is any attack that modifies a flow.  Some passive
   attacks involve active interception and modifications of devices,
   rather than simple access to the medium.  The introduced terms are:

   Pervasive Attack:  An attack on Internet communications that makes
      use of access at a large number of points in the network, or




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      otherwise provides the attacker with access to a large amount of
      Internet traffic; see [RFC7258].

   Passive Pervasive Attack:    An eavesdropping attack undertaken by a
      pervasive attacker, in which the packets in a traffic stream
      between two endpoints are intercepted, but in which the attacker
      does not modify the packets in the traffic stream between two
      endpoints, modify the treatment of packets in the traffic stream
      (e.g. delay, routing), or add or remove packets in the traffic
      stream.  Passive pervasive attacks are undetectable from the
      endpoints.  Equivalent to passive wiretapping as defined in
      [RFC4949]; we use an alternate term here since the methods
      employed are wider than those implied by the word "wiretapping",
      including the active compromise of intermediate systems.

   Active Pervasive Attack:  An attack undertaken by a pervasive
      attacker, which in addition to the elements of a passive pervasive
      attack, also includes modification, addition, or removal of
      packets in a traffic stream, or modification of treatment of
      packets in the traffic stream.  Active pervasive attacks provide
      more capabilities to the attacker at the risk of possible
      detection at the endpoints.  Equivalent to active wiretapping as
      defined in [RFC4949].

   Observation:  Information collected directly from communications by
      an eavesdropper or observer.  For example, the knowledge that
      <alice@example.com> sent a message to <bob@example.com> via SMTP
      taken from the headers of an observed SMTP message would be an
      observation.

   Inference:  Information derived from analysis of information
      collected directly from communications by an eavesdropper or
      observer.  For example, the knowledge that a given web page was
      accessed by a given IP address, by comparing the size in octets of
      measured network flow records to fingerprints derived from known
      sizes of linked resources on the web servers involved, would be an
      inference.

   Collaborator:  An entity that is a legitimate participant in a
      communication, and provides information about that communication
      to an attacker.  Collaborators may either deliberately or
      unwittingly cooperate with the attacker, in the latter case
      because the attacker has subverted the collaborator through
      technical, social, or other means.

   Key Exfiltration:  The transmission of cryptographic keying material
      for an encrypted communication from a collaborator, deliberately
      or unwittingly, to an attacker.



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   Content Exfiltration:  The transmission of the content of a
      communication from a collaborator, deliberately or unwittingly, to
      an attacker

3.  An Idealized Passive Pervasive Attacker

   In considering the threat posed by pervasive surveillance, we begin
   by defining an idealized passive pervasive attacker.  While this
   attacker is less capable than those which we now know to have
   compromised the Internet from press reports, as elaborated in
   Section 4, it does set a lower bound on the capabilities of an
   attacker interested in indiscriminate passive surveillance while
   interested in remaining undetectable.  We note that, prior to the
   Snowden revelations in 2013, the assumptions of attacker capability
   presented here would be considered on the border of paranoia outside
   the network security community.

   Our idealized attacker is an indiscriminate eavesdropper on an
   Internet-attached computer network that:

   o  can observe every packet of all communications at any hop in any
      network path between an initiator and a recipient;

   o  can observe data at rest in any intermediate system between the
      endpoints controlled by the initiator and recipient; and

   o  can share information with other such attackers; but

   o  takes no other action with respect to these communications (i.e.,
      blocking, modification, injection, etc.).

      The techniques available to our ideal attacker are direct
      observation and inference.  Direct observation involves taking
      information directly from eavesdropped communications, such as
      URLs identifying content or email addresses identifying
      individuals from application- layer headers.  Inference, on the
      other hand, involves analyzing observed information to derive new
      information, such as searching for application or behavioral
      fingerprints in observed traffic to derive information about the
      observed individual.  The use of encryption is generally
      sufficient to provide confidentiality by preventing direct
      observation of content, assuming of course, uncompromised
      encryption implementations and cryptographic keying material.
      However, encryption provides less complete protection against
      inference, especially inferences based only on plaintext portions
      of communications, such as IP and TCP headers for TLS-protected
      traffic [RFC5246]).




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3.1.  Information subject to direct observation

   Protocols which 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 which encrypts 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 [I-D.ietf-dprive-problem-statement], 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.

3.2.  Information useful for inference

   Inference is information extracted from later analysis of an observed
   or eavesdropped communication, and/or correlation of observed or
   eavesdropped information with information available from other
   sources.  Indeed, most useful inference performed by the attacker
   falls under the rubric of correlation.  The simplest example of this
   is the observation of DNS queries and answers from and to a source
   and correlating those with IP addresses with which that source
   communicates.  This can give access to information otherwise not
   available from encrypted application payloads (e.g., the Host:
   HTTP/1.1 request header when HTTP is used with TLS).

   Protocols which encrypt their payload using an application- or
   transport-layer encryption scheme (e.g.  TLS) still expose all the
   information in their network and transport layer headers to the
   attacker, including source and destination addresses and ports.
   IPsec ESP [RFC4303] further encrypts the transport-layer headers, but
   still leaves IP address information unencrypted; in tunnel mode,
   these addresses correspond to the tunnel endpoints.  Features of the
   security protocols themselves, e.g. the TLS session identifier, may
   leak information that can be used for correlation and inference.
   While this information is much less semantically rich than the
   application payload, it can still be useful for the inferring an
   individual's activities.




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   Inference can also leverage information obtained from sources other
   than direct traffic observation.  Geolocation databases, for example,
   have been developed that map IP addresses to a location, in order to
   provide location-aware services such as targeted advertising.  This
   location information is often of sufficient resolution that it can be
   used to draw further inferences toward identifying or profiling an
   individual.

   Social media provide another source of more or less publicly
   accessible information.  This information can be extremely
   semantically rich, including information about an individual's
   location, associations with other individuals and groups, and
   activities.  Further, this information is generally contributed and
   curated voluntarily by the individuals themselves: it represents
   information which the individuals are not necessarily interested in
   protecting for privacy reasons.  However, correlation of this social
   networking data with information available from direct observation of
   network traffic allows the creation of a much richer picture of an
   individual's activities than either alone.

   We note with some alarm that there is little that can be done at
   protocol design time to limit such correlation by the attacker, and
   that the existence of such data sources in many cases greatly
   complicates the problem of protecting privacy by hardening protocols
   alone.

3.3.  An illustration of an ideal passive pervasive attack

   To illustrate how capable the idealized attacker is even given its
   limitations, we explore the non-anonymity of encrypted IP traffic in
   this section.  Here we examine in detail some inference techniques
   for associating a set of addresses with an individual, in order to
   illustrate the difficulty of defending communications against our
   idealized attacker.  Here, the basic problem is that information
   radiated even from protocols which have no obvious connection with
   personal data can be correlated with other information which can
   paint a very rich behavioral picture, that only takes one unprotected
   link in the chain to associate with an identity.

3.3.1.  Analysis of IP headers

   Internet traffic can be monitored by tapping Internet links, or by
   installing monitoring tools in Internet routers.  Of course, a single
   link or a single router only provides access to a fraction of the
   global Internet traffic.  However, monitoring a number of high
   capacity links or a set of routers placed at strategic locations
   provides access to a good sampling of Internet traffic.




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   Tools like IPFIX [RFC7011] allow administrators to acquire statistics
   about sequences of packets with some common properties that pass
   through a network device.  The most common set of properties used in
   flow measurement is the "five-tuple" of source and destination
   addresses, protocol type, and source and destination ports.  These
   statistics are commonly used for network engineering, but could
   certainly be used for other purposes.

   Let's assume for a moment that IP addresses can be correlated to
   specific services or specific users.  Analysis of the sequences of
   packets will quickly reveal which users use what services, and also
   which users engage in peer-to-peer connections with other users.
   Analysis of traffic variations over time can be used to detect
   increased activity by particular users, or in the case of peer-to-
   peer connections increased activity within groups of users.

3.3.2.  Correlation of IP addresses to user identities

   The correlation of IP addresses with specific users can be done in
   various ways.  For example, tools like reverse DNS lookup can be used
   to retrieve the DNS names of servers.  Since the addresses of servers
   tend to be quite stable and since servers are relatively less
   numerous than users, an attacker could easily maintain its own copy
   of the DNS for well-known or popular servers, to accelerate such
   lookups.

   On the other hand, the reverse lookup of IP addresses of users is
   generally less informative.  For example, a lookup of the address
   currently used by one author's home network returns a name of the
   form "c-192-000-002-033.hsd1.wa.comcast.net".  This particular type
   of reverse DNS lookup generally reveals only coarse-grained location
   or provider information, equivalent to that available from
   geolocation databases.

   In many jurisdictions, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are required
   to provide identification on a case by case basis of the "owner" of a
   specific IP address for law enforcement purposes.  This is a
   reasonably expedient process for targeted investigations, but
   pervasive surveillance requires something more efficient.  This
   provides an incentive for the attacker to secure the cooperation of
   the ISP in order to automate this correlation.

3.3.3.  Monitoring messaging clients for IP address correlation

   Even if the ISP does not cooperate, user identity can often be
   obtained via inference.  POP3 [RFC1939] and IMAP [RFC3501] are used
   to retrieve mail from mail servers, while a variant of SMTP is used
   to submit messages through mail servers.  IMAP connections originate



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   from the client, and typically start with an authentication exchange
   in which the client proves its identity by answering a password
   challenge.  The same holds for the SIP protocol [RFC3261] and many
   instant messaging services operating over the Internet using
   proprietary protocols.

   The username is directly observable if any of these protocols operate
   in cleartext; the username can then be directly associated with the
   source address.

3.3.4.  Retrieving IP addresses from mail headers

   SMTP [RFC5321] requires that each successive SMTP relay adds a
   "Received" header to the mail headers.  The purpose of these headers
   is to enable audit of mail transmission, and perhaps to distinguish
   between regular mail and spam.  Here is an extract from the headers
   of a message recently received from the "perpass" mailing list:

   "Received: from 192-000-002-044.zone13.example.org (HELO
   ?192.168.1.100?) (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) by lvps192-000-002-219.example.net
   with ESMTPSA (DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA encrypted, authenticated); 27 Oct
   2013 21:47:14 +0100 Message-ID: <526D7BD2.7070908@example.org> Date:
   Sun, 27 Oct 2013 20:47:14 +0000 From: Some One <some.one@example.org>
   "

   This is the first "Received" header attached to the message by the
   first SMTP relay; for privacy reasons, the field values have been
   anonymized.  We learn here that the message was submitted by "Some
   One" on October 27, from a host behind a NAT (192.168.1.100)
   [RFC1918] that used the IP address 192.0.2.44.  The information
   remained in the message, and is accessible by all recipients of the
   "perpass" mailing list, or indeed by any attacker that sees at least
   one copy of the message.

   An attacker that can observe sufficient email traffic can regularly
   update the mapping between public IP addresses and individual email
   identities.  Even if the SMTP traffic was encrypted on submission and
   relaying, the attacker can still receive a copy of public mailing
   lists like "perpass".

3.3.5.  Tracking address usage with web cookies

   Many web sites only encrypt a small fraction of their transactions.
   A popular pattern is to use HTTPS for the login information, and then
   use a "cookie" to associate following clear-text transactions with
   the user's identity.  Cookies are also used by various advertisement
   services to quickly identify the users and serve them with
   "personalized" advertisements.  Such cookies are particularly useful



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   if the advertisement services want to keep tracking the user across
   multiple sessions that may use different IP addresses.

   As cookies are sent in clear text, an attacker can build a database
   that associates cookies to IP addresses for non-HTTPS traffic.  If
   the IP address is already identified, the cookie can be linked to the
   user identify.  After that, if the same cookie appears on a new IP
   address, the new IP address can be immediately associated with the
   pre-determined identity.

3.3.6.  Graph-based approaches to address correlation

   An attacker can track traffic from an IP address not yet associated
   with an individual to various public services (e.g. websites, mail
   servers, game servers), and exploit patterns in the observed traffic
   to correlate this address with other addresses that show similar
   patterns.  For example, any two addresses that show connections to
   the same IMAP or webmail services, the same set of favorite websites,
   and game servers at similar times of day may be associated with the
   same individual.  Correlated addresses can then be tied to an
   individual through one of the techniques above, walking the "network
   graph" to expand the set of attributable traffic.

3.3.7.  Tracking of Link Layer Identifiers

   Moving back down the stack, technologies like Ethernet or Wi-Fi use
   MAC Addresses to identify link-level destinations.  MAC Addresses
   assigned according to IEEE-802 standards are globally-unique
   identifiers for the device.  If the link is publicly accessible, an
   attacker can eavesdrop and perform tracking.  For example, the
   attacker can track the wireless traffic at publicly accessible Wi-Fi
   networks.  Simple devices can monitor the traffic, and reveal which
   MAC Addresses are present.  Also, devices do not need to be connected
   to a network to expose link-layer identifiers.  Active service
   discovery always discloses the MAC address of the user, and sometimes
   the SSIDs of previously visited networks.  For instance, certain
   techniques such as the use of "hidden SSIDs" require the mobile
   device to broadcast the network identifier together with the device
   identifier.  This combination can further expose the user to
   inference attacks, as more information can be derived from the
   combination of MAC address, SSID being probed, time and current
   location.  For example, a user actively probing for a semi-unique
   SSID on a flight out of a certain city can imply that the user is no
   longer at the physical location of the corresponding AP.  Given that
   large-scale databases of the MAC addresses of wireless access points
   for geolocation purposes have been known to exist for some time, the
   attacker could easily build a database linking link-layer
   identifiers, time and device or user identities, and use it to track



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   the movement of devices and of their owners.  On the other hand, if
   the network does not use some form of Wi-Fi encryption, or if the
   attacker can access the decrypted traffic, the analysis will also
   provide the correlation between link-layer identifiers such as MAC
   Addresses and IP addresses.  Additional monitoring using techniques
   exposed in the previous sections will reveal the correlation between
   MAC addresses, IP addresses, and user identity.  For instance,
   similarly to the use of web cookies, MAC addresses provide identity
   information that can be used to associate a user to different IP
   addresses.

4.  Reported Instances of Large-Scale Attacks

   The situation in reality is more bleak than that suggested by an
   analysis of our idealized attacker.  Through revelations of sensitive
   documents in several media outlets, the Internet community has been
   made aware of several intelligence activities conducted by US and UK
   national intelligence agencies, particularly the US National Security
   Agency (NSA) and the UK Government Communications Headquarters
   (GCHQ).  These documents have revealed methods that these agencies
   use to attack Internet applications and obtain sensitive user
   information.  There is little reason to suppose that only the US or
   UK governments are involved in these sorts of activities; the
   examples are just ones that were disclosed.  We note that these
   reports are primarily useful as an illustration of the types of
   capabilities fielded by pervasive attackers as of the date of the
   Snowden leaks in 2013.

   First, they confirm the deployment of large-scale passive collection
   of Internet traffic, which confirms the existence of pervasive
   passive attackers with at least the capabilities of our idealized
   attacker.  For example [pass1][pass2][pass3][pass4]:

   o  NSA's XKEYSCORE system accesses data from multiple access points
      and searches for "selectors" such as email addresses, at the scale
      of tens of terabytes of data per day.

   o  GCHQ's Tempora system appears to have access to around 1,500 major
      cables passing through the UK.

   o  NSA's MUSCULAR program has tapped cables between data centers
      belonging to major service providers.

   o  Several programs appear to perform wide-scale collection of
      cookies in web traffic and location data from location-aware
      portable devices such as smartphones.





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   However, the capabilities described by these reports go beyond those
   of our idealized attacker.  They include the compromise of
   cryptographic protocols, including decryption of TLS-protected
   Internet sessions [dec1][dec2][dec3].  For example, the NSA BULLRUN
   project worked to undermine encryption through multiple approaches,
   including covert modifications to cryptographic software on end
   systems.

   Reported capabilities include the direct compromise of intermediate
   systems and arrangements with service providers for bulk data and
   metadata access [dir1][dir2][dir3], bypassing the need to capture
   traffic on the wire.  For example, the NSA PRISM program provides the
   agency with access to many types of user data (e.g., email, chat,
   VoIP).

   The reported capabilities also include elements of active pervasive
   attack, including:

   o  Insertion of devices as a man-in-the-middle of Internet
      transactions [TOR1][TOR2].  For example, NSA's QUANTUM system
      appears to use several different techniques to hijack HTTP
      connections, ranging from DNS response injection to HTTP 302
      redirects.

   o  Use of implants on end systems to undermine security and anonymity
      features [dec2][TOR1][TOR2].  For example, QUANTUM is used to
      direct users to a FOXACID server, which in turn delivers an
      implant to compromise browsers of Tor users.

   o  Use of implants on network elements from many major equipment
      providers, including Cisco, Juniper, Huawei, Dell, and HP, as
      provided by the NSA's Advanced Network Technology group.
      [spiegel1]

   o  Use of botnet-scale collections of compromised hosts [spiegel3].

   The scale of the compromise extends beyond the network to include
   subversion of the technical standards process itself.  For example,
   there is suspicion that NSA modifications to the DUAL_EC_DRBG random
   number generator were made to ensure that keys generated using that
   generator could be predicted by NSA.  This RNG was made part of
   NIST's SP 800-90A, for which NIST acknowledges NSA's assistance.
   There have also been reports that the NSA paid RSA Security for a
   related contract with the result that the curve became the default in
   the RSA BSAFE product line.

   We use the term "pervasive attack" [RFC7258] to collectively describe
   these operations.  The term "pervasive" is used because the attacks



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   are designed to indiscriminately gather as much data as possible and
   to apply selective analysis on targets after the fact.  This means
   that all, or nearly all, Internet communications are targets for
   these attacks.  To achieve this scale, the attacks are physically
   pervasive; they affect a large number of Internet communications.
   They are pervasive in content, consuming and exploiting any
   information revealed by the protocol.  And they are pervasive in
   technology, exploiting many different vulnerabilities in many
   different protocols.

   Again, it's important to note that, although the attacks mentioned
   above were executed by NSA and GCHQ, there are many other
   organizations that can mount pervasive surveillance attacks.  Because
   of the resources required to achieve pervasive scale, these attacks
   are most commonly undertaken by nation-state actors.  For example,
   the Chinese Internet filtering system known as the "Great Firewall of
   China" uses several techniques that are similar to the QUANTUM
   program, and which have a high degree of pervasiveness with regard to
   the Internet in China.  Therefore, legal restrictions in any one
   jurisdiction on pervasive monitoring activities cannot eliminate the
   risk of pervasive attack to the Internet as a whole.

5.  Threat Model

   Given these disclosures, we must consider a broader threat model.

   Pervasive surveillance aims to collect information across a large
   number of Internet communications, analyzing the collected
   communications to identify information of interest within individual
   communications, or inferring information from correlated
   communications.  This analysis sometimes benefits from decryption of
   encrypted communications and deanonymization of anonymized
   communications.  As a result, these attackers desire both access to
   the bulk of Internet traffic and to the keying material required to
   decrypt any traffic that has been encrypted.  Even if keys are not
   available, note that the presence of a communication and the fact
   that it is encrypted may both be inputs to an analysis, even if the
   attacker cannot decrypt the communication.

   The attacks listed above highlight new avenues both for access to
   traffic and for access to relevant encryption keys.  They further
   indicate that the scale of surveillance is sufficient to provide a
   general capability to cross-correlate communications, a threat not
   previously thought to be relevant at the scale of the Internet.







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5.1.  Attacker Capabilities

    +--------------------------+-------------------------------------+
    | Attack Class             | Capability                          |
    +--------------------------+-------------------------------------+
    | Passive observation      | Directly capture data in transit    |
    |                          |                                     |
    | Passive inference        | Infer from reduced/encrypted data   |
    |                          |                                     |
    | Active                   | Manipulate / inject data in transit |
    |                          |                                     |
    | Static key exfiltration  | Obtain key material once / rarely   |
    |                          |                                     |
    | Dynamic key exfiltration | Obtain per-session key material     |
    |                          |                                     |
    | Content exfiltration     | Access data at rest                 |
    +--------------------------+-------------------------------------+

   Security analyses of Internet protocols commonly consider two classes
   of attacker: Passive pervasive attackers, who can simply listen in on
   communications as they transit the network, and active pervasive
   attackers, who can modify or delete packets in addition to simply
   collecting them.

   In the context of pervasive passive surveillance, these attacks take
   on an even greater significance.  In the past, these attackers were
   often assumed to operate near the edge of the network, where attacks
   can be simpler.  For example, in some LANs, it is simple for any node
   to engage in passive listening to other nodes' traffic or inject
   packets to accomplish active pervasive attacks.  However, as we now
   know, both passive and active pervasive attacks are undertaken by
   pervasive attackers closer to the core of the network, greatly
   expanding the scope and capability of the attacker.

   Eavesdropping and observation at a larger scale make passive
   inference attacks easier to carry out: a passive pervasive attacker
   with access to a large portion of the Internet can analyze collected
   traffic to create a much more detailed view of individual behavior
   than an attacker that collects at a single point.  Even the usual
   claim that encryption defeats passive pervasive attackers is
   weakened, since a pervasive flow access attacker can infer
   relationships from correlations over large numbers of sessions, e.g.,
   pairing encrypted sessions with unencrypted sessions from the same
   host, or performing traffic fingerprinting between known and unknown
   encrypted sessions.  Reports on the NSA XKEYSCORE system would
   indicate it is an example of such an attacker.





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   An active pervasive attacker likewise has capabilities beyond those
   of a localized active attacker.  Flow modification attacks are often
   limited by network topology, for example by a requirement that the
   attacker be able to see a targeted session as well as inject packets
   into it.  A pervasive flow modification attacker with access at
   multiple points within the core of the Internet is able to overcome
   these topological limitations and perform attacks over a much broader
   scope.  Being positioned in the core of the network rather than the
   edge can also enable an active pervasive attacker to reroute targeted
   traffic, amplifying the ability to perform both eavesdropping and
   traffic injection.  Active pervasive attackers can also benefit from
   passive pervasive collection to identify vulnerable hosts.

   While not directly related to pervasiveness, attackers that are in a
   position to mount a active pervasive attack are also often in a
   position to subvert authentication, a traditional protection against
   such attacks.  Authentication in the Internet is often achieved via
   trusted third party authorities such as the Certificate Authorities
   (CAs) that provide web sites with authentication credentials.  An
   attacker with sufficient resources may also be able to induce an
   authority to grant credentials for an identity of the attacker's
   choosing.  If the parties to a communication will trust multiple
   authorities to certify a specific identity, this attack may be
   mounted by suborning any one of the authorities (the proverbial
   "weakest link").  Subversion of authorities in this way can allow an
   active attack to succeed in spite of an authentication check.

   Beyond these three classes (observation, inference, and active),
   reports on the BULLRUN effort to defeat encryption and the PRISM
   effort to obtain data from service providers suggest three more
   classes of attack:

   o  Static key exfiltration

   o  Dynamic key exfiltration

   o  Content exfiltration

   These attacks all rely on a collaborator providing the attacker with
   some information, either keys or data.  These attacks have not
   traditionally been considered in scope for the Security
   Considerations sections of IETF protocols, as they occur outside the
   protocol.

   The term "key exfiltration" refers to the transfer of keying material
   for an encrypted communication from the collaborator to the attacker.
   By "static", we mean that the transfer of keys happens once, or
   rarely, typically of a long-lived key.  For example, this case would



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   cover a web site operator that provides the private key corresponding
   to its HTTPS certificate to an intelligence agency.

   "Dynamic" key exfiltration, by contrast, refers to attacks in which
   the collaborator delivers keying material to the attacker frequently,
   e.g., on a per-session basis.  This does not necessarily imply
   frequent communications with the attacker; the transfer of keying
   material may be virtual.  For example, if an endpoint were modified
   in such a way that the attacker could predict the state of its
   psuedorandom number generator, then the attacker would be able to
   derive per-session keys even without per-session communications.

   Finally, content exfiltration is the attack in which the collaborator
   simply provides the attacker with the desired data or metadata.
   Unlike the key exfiltration cases, this attack does not require the
   attacker to capture the desired data as it flows through the network.
   The exfiltration is of data at rest, rather than data in transit.
   This increases the scope of data that the attacker can obtain, since
   the attacker can access historical data - the attacker does not have
   to be listening at the time the communication happens.

   Exfiltration attacks can be accomplished via attacks against one of
   the parties to a communication, i.e., by the attacker stealing the
   keys or content rather than the party providing them willingly.  In
   these cases, the party may not be aware that they are collaborating,
   at least at a human level.  Rather, the subverted technical assets
   are "collaborating" with the attacker (by providing keys/content)
   without their owner's knowledge or consent.

   Any party that has access to encryption keys or unencrypted data can
   be a collaborator.  While collaborators are typically the endpoints
   of a communication (with encryption securing the links),
   intermediaries in an unencrypted communication can also facilitate
   content exfiltration attacks as collaborators by providing the
   attacker access to those communications.  For example, documents
   describing the NSA PRISM program claim that NSA is able to access
   user data directly from servers, where it is stored unencrypted.  In
   these cases, the operator of the server would be a collaborator, if
   an unwitting one.  By contrast, in the NSA MUSCULAR program, a set of
   collaborators enabled attackers to access the cables connecting data
   centers used by service providers such as Google and Yahoo.  Because
   communications among these data centers were not encrypted, the
   collaboration by an intermediate entity allowed NSA to collect
   unencrypted user data.







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5.2.  Attacker Costs

     +--------------------------+-----------------------------------+
     | Attack Class             | Cost / Risk to Attacker           |
     +--------------------------+-----------------------------------+
     | Passive observation      | Passive data access               |
     |                          |                                   |
     | Passive inference        | Passive data access + processing  |
     |                          |                                   |
     | Active                   | Active data access + processing   |
     |                          |                                   |
     | Static key exfiltration  | One-time interaction              |
     |                          |                                   |
     | Dynamic key exfiltration | Ongoing interaction / code change |
     |                          |                                   |
     | Content exfiltration     | Ongoing, bulk interaction         |
     +--------------------------+-----------------------------------+

   Each of the attack types discussed in the previous section entails
   certain costs and risks.  These costs differ by attack, and can be
   helpful in guiding response to pervasive attack.

   Depending on the attack, the attacker may be exposed to several types
   of risk, ranging from simply losing access to arrest or prosecution.
   In order for any of these negative consequences to occur, however,
   the attacker must first be discovered and identified.  So the primary
   risk we focus on here is the risk of discovery and attribution.

   A passive pervasive attack is the simplest to mount in some ways.
   The base requirement is that the attacker obtain physical access to a
   communications medium and extract communications from it.  For
   example, the attacker might tap a fiber-optic cable, acquire a mirror
   port on a switch, or listen to a wireless signal.  The need for these
   taps to have physical access or proximity to a link exposes the
   attacker to the risk that the taps will be discovered.  For example,
   a fiber tap or mirror port might be discovered by network operators
   noticing increased attenuation in the fiber or a change in switch
   configuration.  Of course, passive pervasive attacks may be
   accomplished with the cooperation of the network operator, in which
   case there is a risk that the attacker's interactions with the
   network operator will be exposed.

   In many ways, the costs and risks for an active pervasive attack are
   similar to those for a passive pervasive attack, with a few
   additions.  An active attacker requires more robust network access
   than a passive attacker, since for example they will often need to
   transmit data as well as receive it.  In the wireless example above,
   the attacker would need to act as an transmitter as well as receiver,



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   greatly increasing the probability the attacker will be discovered
   (e.g., using direction-finding technology).  Active attacks are also
   much more observable at higher layers of the network.  For example,
   an active attacker that attempts to use a mis-issued certificate
   could be detected via Certificate Transparency [RFC6962].

   In terms of raw implementation complexity, passive pervasive attacks
   require only enough processing to extract information from the
   network and store it.  Active pervasive attacks, by contrast, often
   depend on winning race conditions to inject packets into active
   connections.  So active pervasive attacks in the core of the network
   require processing hardware to that can operate at line speed
   (roughly 100Gbps to 1Tbps in the core) to identify opportunities for
   attack and insert attack traffic in a high-volume traffic.  Key
   exfiltration attacks rely on passive pervasive attack for access to
   encrypted data, with the collaborator providing keys to decrypt the
   data.  So the attacker undertakes the cost and risk of a passive
   pervasive attack, as well as additional risk of discovery via the
   interactions that the attacker has with the collaborator.

   Some active attacks are more expensive than others.  For example,
   active man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks require access to one or more
   points on a communication's network path that allow visibility of the
   entire session and the ability to modify or drop legitimate packets
   in favor of the attacker's packets.  A similar but weaker form of
   attack, called an active man-on-the-side (MOTS), requires access to
   only part of the session.  In an active MOTS attack, the attacker
   need only be able to inject or modify traffic on the network element
   the attacker has access to.  While this may not allow for full
   control of a communication session (as in an MITM attack), the
   attacker can perform a number of powerful attacks, including but not
   limited to: injecting packets that could terminate the session (e.g.,
   TCP RST packets), sending a fake DNS reply to redirect ensuing TCP
   connections to an address of the attacker's choice (i.e., winning a
   "DNS response race"), and mounting an HTTP Redirect attack by
   observing a TCP/HTTP connection to a target address and injecting a
   TCP data packet containing an HTTP redirect.  For example, the system
   dubbed by researchers as China's "Great Cannon" [great-cannon] can
   operate in ful MITM mode to accomplish very complex attacks that can
   modify content in transit while the well-known Great Firewall of
   China is a MOTS system that focuses on blocking access to certain
   kinds of traffic and destinations via TCP RST packet injection.

   In this sense, static exfiltration has a lower risk profile than
   dynamic.  In the static case, the attacker need only interact with
   the collaborator a small number of times, possibly only once, say to
   exchange a private key.  In the dynamic case, the attacker must have
   continuing interactions with the collaborator.  As noted above these



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   interactions may be real, such as in-person meetings, or virtual,
   such as software modifications that render keys available to the
   attacker.  Both of these types of interactions introduce a risk that
   they will be discovered, e.g., by employees of the collaborator
   organization noticing suspicious meetings or suspicious code changes.

   Content exfiltration has a similar risk profile to dynamic key
   exfiltration.  In a content exfiltration attack, the attacker saves
   the cost and risk of conducting a passive pervasive attack.  The risk
   of discovery through interactions with the collaborator, however, is
   still present, and may be higher.  The content of a communication is
   obviously larger than the key used to encrypt it, often by several
   orders of magnitude.  So in the content exfiltration case, the
   interactions between the collaborator and the attacker need to be
   much higher-bandwidth than in the key exfiltration cases, with a
   corresponding increase in the risk that this high-bandwidth channel
   will be discovered.

   It should also be noted that in these latter three exfiltration
   cases, the collaborator also undertakes a risk that his collaboration
   with the attacker will be discovered.  Thus the attacker may have to
   incur additional cost in order to convince the collaborator to
   participate in the attack.  Likewise, the scope of these attacks is
   limited to case where the attacker can convince a collaborator to
   participate.  If the attacker is a national government, for example,
   it may be able to compel participation within its borders, but have a
   much more difficult time recruiting foreign collaborators.

   As noted above, the collaborator in an exfiltration attack can be
   unwitting; the attacker can steal keys or data to enable the attack.
   In some ways, the risks of this approach are similar to the case of
   an active collaborator.  In the static case, the attacker needs to
   steal information from the collaborator once; in the dynamic case,
   the attacker needs to continued presence inside the collaborators
   systems.  The main difference is that the risk in this case is of
   automated discovery (e.g., by intrusion detection systems) rather
   than discovery by humans.

6.  Security Considerations

   This document describes a threat model for pervasive surveillance
   attacks.  Mitigations are to be given in a future document.

7.  IANA Considerations

   This document has no actions for IANA.





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8.  IAB Members at the Time of Approval

   Jari Arkko (IETF Chair)
   Mary Barnes
   Marc Blanchet
   Ralph Droms
   Ted Hardie
   Joe Hildebrand
   Russ Housley
   Erik Nordmark
   Robert Sparks
   Andrew Sullivan
   Dave Thaler
   Brian Trammell
   Suzanne Woolf

9.  Acknowledgements

   Thanks to Dave Thaler for the list of attacks and taxonomy; to
   Security Area Directors Stephen Farrell, Sean Turner, and Kathleen
   Moriarty for starting and managing the IETF's discussion on pervasive
   attack; and to Stephan Neuhaus, Mark Townsley, Chris Inacio,
   Evangelos Halepilidis, Bjoern Hoehrmann, Aziz Mohaisen, Russ Housley,
   Joe Hall, Andrew Sullivan, the IEEE 802 Privacy Executive Committee
   SG, and the IAB Privacy and Security Program for their input.

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, July
              2013.

10.2.  Informative References

   [pass1]    The Guardian, "How the NSA is still harvesting your online
              data", 2013,
              <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/27/
              nsa-online-metadata-collection>.

   [pass2]    The Guardian, "NSA's Prism surveillance program: how it
              works and what it can do", 2013,
              <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/08/
              nsa-prism-server-collection-facebook-google>.





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   [pass3]    The Guardian, "XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly
              everything a user does on the internet'", 2013,
              <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/
              nsa-top-secret-program-online-data>.

   [pass4]    The Guardian, "How does GCHQ's internet surveillance
              work?", n.d., <http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/
              how-does-gchq-internet-surveillance-work>.

   [dec1]     The New York Times, "N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards
              of Privacy on Web", 2013,
              <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/
              nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html>.

   [dec2]     The Guardian, "Project Bullrun - classification guide to
              the NSA's decryption program", 2013,
              <http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/sep/05/
              nsa-project-bullrun-classification-guide>.

   [dec3]     The Guardian, "Revealed: how US and UK spy agencies defeat
              internet privacy and security", 2013,
              <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/
              nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security>.

   [TOR1]     Schneier, B., "How the NSA Attacks Tor/Firefox Users With
              QUANTUM and FOXACID", 2013,
              <https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/
              how_the_nsa_att.html>.

   [TOR2]     The Guardian, "'Tor Stinks' presentation - read the full
              document", 2013,
              <http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/04/
              tor-stinks-nsa-presentation-document>.

   [dir1]     The Guardian, "NSA collecting phone records of millions of
              Verizon customers daily", 2013,
              <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/
              nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order>.

   [dir2]     The Guardian, "NSA Prism program taps in to user data of
              Apple, Google and others", 2013,
              <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/
              us-tech-giants-nsa-data>.

   [dir3]     The Guardian, "Sigint - how the NSA collaborates with
              technology companies", 2013,
              <http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/sep/05/
              sigint-nsa-collaborates-technology-companies>.



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   [spiegel1]
              C Stocker, ., "NSA's Secret Toolbox: Unit Offers Spy
              Gadgets for Every Need", December 2013,
              <http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-secret-
              toolbox-ant-unit-offers-spy-gadgets-for-every-need-
              a-941006.html>.

   [spiegel3]
              H Schmundt, ., "The Digital Arms Race: NSA Preps America
              for Future Battle", January 2014,
              <http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/new-snowden-
              docs-indicate-scope-of-nsa-preparations-for-cyber-battle-
              a-1013409.html>.

   [great-cannon]
              Paxson, V., "China's Great Cannon", 2015,
              <https://citizenlab.org/2015/04/chinas-great-cannon/>.

   [RFC1035]  Mockapetris, P., "Domain names - implementation and
              specification", STD 13, RFC 1035, November 1987.

   [RFC1918]  Rekhter, Y., Moskowitz, R., Karrenberg, D., Groot, G., and
              E. Lear, "Address Allocation for Private Internets", BCP
              5, RFC 1918, February 1996.

   [RFC1939]  Myers, J. and M. Rose, "Post Office Protocol - Version 3",
              STD 53, RFC 1939, May 1996.

   [RFC3261]  Rosenberg, J., Schulzrinne, H., Camarillo, G., Johnston,
              A., Peterson, J., Sparks, R., Handley, M., and E.
              Schooler, "SIP: Session Initiation Protocol", RFC 3261,
              June 2002.

   [RFC3365]  Schiller, J., "Strong Security Requirements for Internet
              Engineering Task Force Standard Protocols", BCP 61, RFC
              3365, August 2002.

   [RFC3501]  Crispin, M., "INTERNET MESSAGE ACCESS PROTOCOL - VERSION
              4rev1", RFC 3501, March 2003.

   [RFC4033]  Arends, R., Austein, R., Larson, M., Massey, D., and S.
              Rose, "DNS Security Introduction and Requirements", RFC
              4033, March 2005.

   [RFC4303]  Kent, S., "IP Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP)", RFC
              4303, December 2005.





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   [RFC4949]  Shirey, R., "Internet Security Glossary, Version 2", RFC
              4949, August 2007.

   [RFC5246]  Dierks, T. and E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security
              (TLS) Protocol Version 1.2", RFC 5246, August 2008.

   [RFC5321]  Klensin, J., "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", RFC 5321,
              October 2008.

   [RFC6962]  Laurie, B., Langley, A., and E. Kasper, "Certificate
              Transparency", RFC 6962, June 2013.

   [RFC7011]  Claise, B., Trammell, B., and P. Aitken, "Specification of
              the IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) Protocol for the
              Exchange of Flow Information", STD 77, RFC 7011, September
              2013.

   [RFC7258]  Farrell, S. and H. Tschofenig, "Pervasive Monitoring Is an
              Attack", BCP 188, RFC 7258, May 2014.

   [I-D.ietf-dprive-problem-statement]
              Bortzmeyer, S., "DNS privacy considerations", draft-ietf-
              dprive-problem-statement-05 (work in progress), May 2015.

Authors' Addresses

   Richard Barnes

   Email: rlb@ipv.sx


   Bruce Schneier

   Email: schneier@schneier.com


   Cullen Jennings

   Email: fluffy@cisco.com


   Ted Hardie

   Email: ted.ietf@gmail.com







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   Brian Trammell

   Email: ietf@trammell.ch


   Christian Huitema

   Email: huitema@huitema.net


   Daniel Borkmann

   Email: dborkman@iogearbox.net






































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