Subject: [perpass] Creating confidence in endpoints with protocols.

From: Ross Snider <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 14:41:39 -0700

Apologies in advance for the length of the proposal. There is no TL;DR.
Request for comment.

A large issue with widespread surveillance is that we are unable to trust
even endpoints with some data, no matter the security of the container for
that data in transit between clients, as endpoints may be pressured
financially or politically into cooperation or may be compromised. Many
stakeholders have called for the effort to involve not only engineering but
some amount of legal and policy reform.

It may at first seem unfortunate that all we have influence over are
protocol standards. More hopeless still is to realize that passing the
right policies and laws in North America won't fix our problem as agencies
and companies under the jurisdiction of the United States are not the only
players in the surveillance game, nor will they be in the
future. Furthermore there will likely be escape clauses around policies and
laws, especially where there may be international cooperation between
countries with unique mandates.

I'd like to bring up the fact that there *are* some things we can do to
limit the damage that untrusted endpoints can do from a protocol
perspective (far above and beyond authorization/authentication).

Secure Multiparty Communication is now, and has been, a feasible technology
- it's merely lacked a standardized protocol. I argue that its lack of
adoption so far is due to said lack of a standard.

With SMC, parties can interact to solve problems like:
- Personalized advertisements without the advertising company getting raw
access to preferences, browsing history or target demographics.
- Search or database results without the service provider obtaining
unencrypted access to the query.
- Determine the winner of auction without revealing what price was paid (or
compute a fair price of an auction market whilst keeping financial
information of participants secure, as was done with sugar beets by the
Danish)
- Look up sex predators in an area without revealing an address.
- Transfer money from a customer to a merchant without revealing the
customer's credit card number to the merchant or the merchant's business ID
to the customer.

That is to say with SMC there can be a finer gauged level of control over
what data gets shared with what endpoints. It is a way to engage in
cooperative computation without giving up permanent control of personal
data.

Furthermore there are many protocols to consider that have been vetted by
academics and peer review, some of which are *unconditionally* secure so
that there is no need to worry at the possibility of cryptographic
backdoors.

Nothing comes for free: there is communication and computation overhead
that is induced by participating in such a protocol. Thankfully the
constants and communication rates involved in modern SMC are small enough
to make many applications practical.

We argue that now is the time to consider creating a standard for SMC, as
underlying cryptographic gadgets will only become more efficient after
standardization and because it's applications have become significantly
more important.

Soliciting feedback.

Best,
Ross Snider

---

From: Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 23:10:00 +0100

Hiya,

If that's approaching being computationally practical then
I'd say write an I-D describing how it works and pursue it
in the usual IETF style. If it works and gets adopted then
I agree it could be useful.

Cheers,
S.

On 09/10/2013 10:41 PM, Ross Snider wrote:
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