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Debate On Anonymity Online: Key Insights And Security Implications

This is a discussion between Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer of BT Global Services and the author of Schneier on Security, and a world-famous cryptographer, among other things, and Marcus Ranum, the CSO of Tenable Network Security and is a well-known security technology innovator, teacher and speaker. Both are highly-regarded security visionaries and this is a really great discussion of anonymity on the Internet today. Point: Bruce Schneier Universal identification is portrayed by some as the holy grail of Internet security. Anonymity is bad, the argument goes; and if we abolish it, we can ensure only the proper people have access to their own information. Counterpoint: Marcus Ranum : Obviously, we need to deal with reality, but you've made the mistake of assuming that just because something will always be there, it's right. By that logic, most crime would be OK, and I think we probably agree that it's not. . Continues Schneier The problem is that it won't work. Any design of the Internet must allow for anonymity. Universal identification is impossible. Even attribution -- knowing who is responsible for particular Internet packets -- is impossible. Attempting to build such a system is futile, and will only give criminals and hackers new ways to hide. Imagine a magic world in which every Internet packet could be traced to its origin. Even in this world, our Internet security problems wouldn't be solved. There's a huge gap between proving that a packet came from a particular computer and that a packet was directed by a particular person. This is the exact problem we have with botnets, or pedophiles storing child porn on innocents' computers. In these cases, we know the origins of the DDoS packets and the spam; they're from legitimate machines that have been hacked. Attribution isn't as valuable as you might think. Implementing an Internet without anonymity is very difficult, and causes its own problems. In order to have perfect attribution, we'd need agencies -- real-worldorganizations -- to provide Internet identity credentials based on other identification systems: passports, national identity cards, driver's licenses, whatever. Sloppier identification systems, based on things such as credit cards, are simply too easy to subvert. We have nothing that comes close to this global identification infrastructure. Moreover, centralizing information like this actually hurts security because it makes identity theft that much more profitable a crime. And realistically, any theoretical ideal Internet would need to allow people access even without their magic credentials. People would still use the Internet at public kiosks and at friends' houses. People would lose their magic Internet tokens just like they lose their driver's licenses and passports today. The legitimate bypass mechanisms would allow even more ways for criminals and hackers to subvert the system. On top of all this, the magic attribution technology doesn't exist. Bits are bits; they don't come with identity information attached to them. Every software system we've ever invented has been successfully hacked, repeatedly. We simply don't have anywhere near the expertise to build an airtight attribution system. Not that it really matters. Even if everyone could trace all packets perfectly, to the person or origin and not just the computer, anonymity would still be possible. It would just take one person to set up an anonymity server. If I wanted to send a packet anonymously to someone else, I'd just route it through that server. For even greater anonymity, I could route it through multiple servers. This is called onion routing and, with appropriate cryptography and enough users, it adds anonymity back to any communications system that prohibits it. The link for this article located at Search Security is no longer available. . The debate on banning online anonymity raises crucial issues for security, balancing user safety with the need for privacy and freedom of expression in digital spaces. Internet Anonymity,Online Security, Privacy Issues, Identity Systems. . LinuxSecurity.com Team

Feb 17, 2010 • LinuxSecurity.com Team Privacy