[liberationtech] RFC: comments on discovery mechanisms

[liberationtech at lewman.us]

On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 06:58:49PM -0800, schoen at eff.org wrote 3.2K bytes in 73 lines about:
: You might be interested in Bram's list at
: http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/73933.html
: which seemed like a pretty thorough list of relevant tactics within
: his taxonomy.

It seems there is a plethora of research into this bootstrapping problem,
Many organizations, including Tor, are involved in active research into
making progress in this field of research.  On the other hand, botnet
operators and creators seem to be doing just fine.  Many of the recent
approaches I've seen are taken directly from the botnet community.

: If IPv4 address space is exhausted soon, it might become harder or
: more expensive for circumvention service operators to get all the
: fresh IP addresses they might want.  This is probably a less extreme
: concern for services like Tor that directly try to persuade new
: populations of end users to start running proxies, as opposed to
: services that have to put servers in commercial colocation.

IPv4 space isn't running out.  Unallocated IPv4 space is limited and
diminishing.  The great IPv4 land rush is finally coming to a close.
There is still plenty of slop and holes in used vs. unused IPv4 space
[1]. If IANA and the Regional Internet Registries start asking for
justification of /8 and /16 allocations, perhaps providing it to human
rights operators is valid.  For many of the proxy systems, getting
access to new IP space is their only option for keeping up with the
censorship arms race.  In some cases, you don't need to run the proxy
system software itself, just redirect IP addresses to systems running
the software.

Another interesting bit is that many commercial and government
censorship systems completely ignore IPV6 right now.  If you can get a
valid IPv6 address, chances are you can use a 6to4 [2] proxy to get to
the rest of the Internet.

[1] http://www.technologyreview.com/web/21528/?a=f is one such study.
[2] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/6to4

-- 
Andrew
pgp key: 31B0974B