Secret Forum Reveals Oz Firewall Backroom Dealing
Circumvention legal, but you can't tell anyone how[.]
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Emphasis is theirs.
Now say what? It will be legal to circumvent (technical details at the bottom), but illegal to explain to someone else how to perform this perfectly legal configuration. I wonder how this might affect a corporate or ISP helpdesk perform VPN connectivity setup?
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Australia’s plans for a firewall to protect its population from smut on the internet are rapidly evolving from farce to total chaos. Weekly revelations on bulletin boards suggest that
Stephen Conroy, the man behind the big idea, does not know what forthcoming legislation on the topic will say, when it will be introduced or how the firewall will work in practice.
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This time, emphasis is mine. I want to continue to point out how big of an asshat this particular Australian politician is. He is the "Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy." He's the one that floated the idea of this nation-wide "firewall" (which is technically a proxy since it will be filtering at layer 7 - hence the technical problems) to "protect" citizens from illegal, immoral, or "dangerous" content. This is nearly the same thing the Chinese and Iranians are doing, just using layer 7 proxy devices instead of what's assumed to be basic layer 3 IP filtering of destination hosts. Skip to the very end of the post for the technical details behind this.
To say this whole thing began as a farce is hitting the nail right on the head.
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Meanwhile, it turns out that the Minister’s own Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) has been hosting a secret forum for discussions with ISPs likely to be affected by proposals. Along the way it floated the idea of making it a crime to advise surfers on how to do things that are perfectly legal to do. Confused? You will be.
First up is the time scale for plans to introduce the new firewall. As
already reported, the question of when legislation will be introduced has now been bouncing between the offices of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. Severe wriggling from Conroy’s office suggests that plans for an early introduction of legislation have been put on the back burner for now.
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Conroy wants to shelve the legislation until after the elections. He's technically incompetent, but he's smart enough to realize that this is going to be a screw-up of biblical proportions and it will likely cost him the election. It's "on the back burner for now," but it's by no means dead.
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Meanwhile further digging inside this forum revealed that departmental officials appear to have been discussing the possibility of making it a criminal offen[s]e to advise individuals of means that would enable them to circumvent the filter – even where the means themselves were perfectly legal.
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I would say that this equates to information being illegal. In a way, that's in the same league as banning books.
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As the EFA suggests, this answer raises more issues than it addresses, and relies on the degradation of the Australian network being gradual, rather than catastrophic. It does appear, however, that the government has no plans to deal with a possible overload of its firewall bringing the Australian internet to its knees – beyond setting up a review when such an event actually happens.
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Why should there be any degradation of bandwidth at all? I suspect that if this goes through, there's going to be a noticeable difference in download speeds and initial access to websites.
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Details:
Circumvention:
Circumvention of these filters will be trivial; you can wrap your request in SSL (such as https:// if the website supports it),
by using a VPN provider outside Australia (many more found on the link for the word "using"), by using
Tor (which uses a technique known as
Onion Routing), or even by viewing blocked pages via the
Google cache.
Technical Considerations:
This filtering is to take place with proxies (at the Application [7] layer) as opposed to the traditional large-scale deployments of firewalls (at the Network [3] and Transport [4]) layers). The deeper you have to inspect a packet, the more CPU and memory required to process the filters. It costs - in many ways, from actual dollars for the hardware and software, to performance impact, to configuration complexity to man-hours of maintenance - considerably more to filter at layer 7 with a proxy than layers 3/4 with a firewall.
The one benefit to filtering at layer 7 is that you block only what is intended to be blocked. In today's world (where we've been running out of IPv4 space for a dacade now) a lot of websites are configured using
virtual hosts. This allows web hosting providers to host a virtually unlimited number of websites on a single IP address. Let's say there are two websites, both hosted on the same virtual host IP address, where one is banned and the other is not:
www.bannedwebsite.co.au (banned)
www.momsrecipies.co.au (allowed)
With a layer 7 proxy, when the user attempts to reach a website, the proxy intercepts the request, checks the request (including hostname and URI), and then either blocks the request, or requests the page on behalf of the end-user and returns her the requested webpage. So your mom can still access www.momsrecipes.co.au while nobody can access www.bannedwebsite.co.au. With a proxy, you can return HTML to the end-user explaining why access to this particular website is blocked and possibly a method of contact to dispute the denial of access.
Pros:
() Finer-grained control of what's filtered
() Less "false positives"
Cons:
() Expensive in many aspects (mentioned above)
() Complex configuration
() Considerable service impact due to use of
DPI at Application [7] layer
() Slightly easier to circumvent; using https is the only circumvention measure mentioned that does not tend to work with the firewall approach - the rest should work against both types
With a layer 3/4 firewall, access to the virtual host IP address (or even the subnet it's part of) will be blocked. When anyone tries to go to www.bannedwebsite.co.au, they are unable to, which is the intended result. They will get a different error; the browser will just report that website was unreachable. End of explanation. If anyone tries to go to www.momsrecipies.co.au, they will also be denied with the same uninformative unreachable error. Since both websites are on the same IP address, the firewall has no way of knowing which website you're looking for, so it blocks everything.
Pros:
() Cheaper to deploy
() Simpler configuration - hundreds of hosts/subnets vs. thousands of hostnames
() Can often be implemented on existing hardware - edge or core routers utilization IP ACLs
() Faster, more responsive access to allowed websites; less service impact
Cons:
() Collateral damage - legitimate sites on the same virtual host as banned site are also blocked
() Slightly more difficult to circumvent (a websites https site will likely be in the same blocked subnet)
Comparison with Other Instances of State-Controlled Internet Access:
I see three major differences in the Australian proposal as opposed to the other major regimes implementing state-wide filtering of websites (China and Iran). They are as follows:
The use of layer 7 proxies instead of layer 3/4 firewalls and route filtering
In China and Iran the responsibility of implementing and maintaining the filters rests on the tier-1 to tier-2 network providers who bring capacity into the country. By filtering at this level, you are enforcing that ISPs block these sites along with everyone else in the country. By placing the responsibility on the ISP, who provides the access to the end-user, you are going to find that ISPs (a) will add/remove entries from the blocked list to fit their own agendas; (b) will suffer varying performance impact and quality of service based on their investment in the filtering technology and correctness of the implementation; (c) will raise prices to pay for increased hardware/software components, man-hours maintaining the systems, and extra capacity required to maintain a reasonable quality of service; and (d) some will become popular with a certain customer base due to being lax in their filter list updates and tendency to allow some banned content.
Another side effect of this proposal, from an economic standpoint, is that it is likely to put smaller ISPs out of business. Instead of putting the smaller burden on the backbone providers, with considerably more capital, it will place a more expensive burden on ISPs with less resources at their disposal. If these filters become legally mandatory, this will likely put smaller ISPs out of business. A smaller provider may not have access to the resources (money, manpower, and know-how) to meet these requirements and will thus have to shut down operations.
The third difference is in the legality and enforcement of the filters. In the Australian proposal, it will be legal to circumvent the filters provided you know how. In China, they are known for randomly allowing then blocking then allowing access to certain websites and enforcement is relatively low. Occasionally they will decide to make an example of someone, and they will end up in prison. In Iran, enforcement is rather strong, with penalties ranging from prison time to possibly "disappearing".
Other Thoughts:
There is one other somewhat commonly used filtering technique involving DNS. The ISP or corporate gateway will transparently route all DNS requests by the end-user to DNS servers under their control. The DNS servers will be configured as authoritative for the blocked domains; typically configured to return an IP address that connects you to a website telling you that your access is blocked and possibly why. This is similar to the Walled Garden approach.
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Cryptography/Privacy (54)