nanog mailing list archives

Re: P2P Darknets to eclipse bandwidth management?


From: Chip Mefford <cpm () well com>
Date: Tue, 06 Sep 2005 14:28:09 -0400


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Florian Weimer wrote:
* Stephen J. Wilcox:


packet inspection will just evolve, thats the nature of this
problem.. there are things you can find out from encrypted flows -
what the endpoints and ports are, who the CA is. then you can look
at the characteristics of the data.


These protocols typically don't use a PKI.  You could look at public
keys, but you don't even have to distribute them in-band.

What you can do is look at packet sizes and do timing analysis on
incoming and outgoing packets to a particular hosts.  For example, it
is possible to use such techniques to detect an interactive SSH
connection to a particular host on your network which is used by an
attacker to control an SSH client which connects to some other host.
I don't know how this scales to tens of thousands of hosts, though.

Apart from that, I do not really understand the concept of "bandwidth
management".  Isn't this this just an euphemism for "content
management", to avoid the ugly "c" word?

In my complete ignorance, I would think that this is part of it
certainly, but would be mostly qos issues.

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