Internet Engineering Task Force J. Pouwelse, Ed. Internet-Draft Delft University of Technology Intended status: Standards Track July 9, 2012 Expires: January 10, 2013 Media without censorship (CensorFree) scenarios draft-pouwelse-censorfree-scenarios-00 Abstract This document describes some scenarios in which one can imagine that the ability of authoritarian regime to censor news dissemination is reduced. It tries to draw some conclusions about what's desirable and what's not acceptable for users in those scenarios. The CensorFree objective is to standardize the protocols for microblogging on smartphones with a focus on security and censorship resistance. Microblog entries are short text messages, possibly enriched with pictures or streaming video. The goal is to devise protocols which guard against all known forms of censorship such as: cyberspace sabotage, digital eavesdropping, infiltration, fraud, Internet kill switches and lawyer-based attacks with the best known protective methods. Status of This Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." This Internet-Draft will expire on January 10, 2013. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2012 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Pouwelse Expires January 10, 2013 [Page 1] Internet-Draft CensorFree July 2012 Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. Table of Contents 1. Requirements Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3. Goal: microblogging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 4. Three driving scenarios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 4.1. 20sec scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 4.2. Internet-Free scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 4.3. Friends-only scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 7.3. URL References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Pouwelse Expires January 10, 2013 [Page 2] Internet-Draft CensorFree July 2012 1. Requirements Language The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119]. 2. Introduction Freedom to spread information is under active attack in various corners of The Internet. Internet freedom has been losing and declining in many areas. The Internet has been put under strict control using mechanisms of significant sophistication and complexity. The age of cyber suppression is upon us and we need to act. The forces favoring freedom need to avoid fragmentation of effort and re-group under a single initiative in order to impact the lives of millions. Democratic countries also face a dilemma. Restrictions on the free information flow is the topics of several proposed laws by elected representatives. The strength of copyright law impacts digital information flow. Politicians must decide between weak copyright law, as championed by civil rights activists versus strong copyright enforcement, as promoted by numerous players in the creative industries. Recent furor around SOPA, PIPA, etc. in the US plus the European Parliament vote on ACTA is highly relevant in this context. A glimmer of hope exists. The Arab Spring shows that a new generation is claiming their right to express themselves. Microblogging, social media in general and traditional satellite news broadcast networks are perceived as critical catalysts for political change. Generic computational fabric is soon getting in the hands of two billion people with the growth of smartphones and increasingly affordable communication. These smartphones are increasingly used to record and spread disruptive audiovisual material, even in regions without media freedom. The uniqueness of The Internet lies in the IETF standards. Moving certain bits to certain locations or offering a service requires no prior official approval. However, Internet-deployed mechanisms now exist which filter news and media in general for both surveillance and censorship. The Internet has ceased to provide reliable transport service for all users. The IETF can repeat itA's historical inter-networking role again by setting the standard for reliable flow of packets of news. Pouwelse Expires January 10, 2013 [Page 3] Internet-Draft CensorFree July 2012 3. Goal: microblogging The goal of creating a microblogging standard and facilitating a reference implementation for portable devices which is capable of operating in a hostile environment. Microblogging is an increasingly popular technology for lightweight interaction over the Internet. It differs from traditional blogging in that [OPENMICRO]: o Posts are short (typically less than 140 characters, which is the limit in SMS). o Posts are in plain text. o People can reply to your posts, but not directly comment on them. o People learn about your posts only if they have permission to view them. o Your microblogging feed is discovered based on your identity at a domain or with a service. This proposed draft standard SHALL provide: "information dissemination from a single smartphone to an audience of millions in the form of microblogging, enriched with pictures or streaming video which is guarded against all known forms of censorship such as: cyberspace sabotage, digital eavesdropping, infiltration, fraud, Internet kill switches and lawyer-based attacks with the best known protective methods". 4. Three driving scenarios Recent events has shown the power of ubiquitous camera-phones, new media and microblogging. This document proposes to uses smartphones, wifi and USB sticks for multimedia playback and transport. The architecture, features and driving scenarios are specifically crafted to enable compliant implementations as a single smartphone app without any additional server infrastructure. 4.1. 20sec scenario First scenario, called "20sec", defines an open microblogging standard. This first scenario duplicates existing microblogging practices with an open standard in a fully decentralized setting. Smartphone owner Alice with wifi-based Internet access records a video, attaches this video to a microblog entry and shares this story plus video automatically with friends Bob and Charlie which are subscribed to her news feed. Alice does not need to trust any central server with her credentials or has to prove her identity to a Pouwelse Expires January 10, 2013 [Page 4] Internet-Draft CensorFree July 2012 central (web) server. Bob and Charlie are both behind a NAT middlebox compliant to the BEHAVE recommendations [RFC4787]. No assistance of a coordinating server (e.g. STUN or TURN) is required to traverse this NAT box using UDP messages. This scenario assumes some form of direct Internet access, the next scenario deals with packet forwarding. The scenario requirements are performance equal to central-server based approach (e.g. the ability to reach 20 million people in 20 seconds), optional backwards compatibility and that there are no dependencies on any kind of central infrastructure (DNS, web servers, access portal, CDN cloud). This first scenario duplicates existing microblogging practices with an open standard in a fully decentralized setting. The 20sec scenario requires that solutions provide seamless backwards compatibility with existing leading solutions by using content import tools (e.g. Twitter, Sina Weibo, chyrp, heello). Proposed open solutions MUST permit easy bulk trans- coding and ingest of existing news feeds into this open standard. An essential feature of the 20sec scenario is all potential central gatekeepers are removed. Ownership of data is fundamental to autonomy. To meet the anti-censorship goal, 20sec assumes an infrastructure which is not dependent and completely decoupled from potentially hostile servers such as DNS servers, web servers, swarm trackers, access portals. 20sec is based on full self-organization. The infrastructure consists purely of devices running compliant implementations. No central server requires installation or maintenance, making this infrastructure independant on any type of funding or business model. 20sec requires an overlay which is highly resilient. Smartphones, tablets and PCs are able to utilize this P2P overlay for microblogging. Existing solutions such as [OPENMICRO] require a central webserver and OAuth-like authentication primitives. This prior work is not suitable for our 20sec scenario, as we aim to remove all server reliance and equality of. 4.2. Internet-Free scenario The Internet-free scenario describes a situation without direct Internet access. It is focussed on ad-hoc packet forwarding between smartphones. Smartphone owner Alice records a video, attaches this video to a microblog entry and shares this story plus video automatically with friends Bob and Charlie which are subscribed to her news feed. at some point within range of the wifi,bluetooth or other wireless capability of Alice. In an age where Smartphone owner Alice has no Internet access. She records a video, Pouwelse Expires January 10, 2013 [Page 5] Internet-Draft CensorFree July 2012 attaches this video to a microblog entry in her phone app. Friends Bob and Charlie are at some point within range of the wifi, bluetooth or other wireless capability of Alice. This fresh microblog entry plus video is shared automatically. Bob obtained the message from Alice because he has software installed which is periodically scanning if other smartphones are around and if they possibly have fresh news. This periodic synchronization is very energy-efficient and requires no re-configuration if he has Internet access with a symmetric NAT. Bob sees no noticeable decrease in battery lifetime after he obtained this unconstrained news access. Charlie later goes to a square where numerous people have gathered, most of which are highly interested in the latest videos. The message automatically spreads in this crowd. Note that this scenario differs from disruption-tolerant networking (DTN). Within DTN the focus lies goes to finding routes to an explicitly given destination, usually by maintaining routing tables. 4.3. Friends-only scenario This third scenario uses friend-to-friend networking to remove the requirement for active networking and wifi sensing. Smartphones need to be synced manually. Reports from repressive regions indicate that USB sticks are commonly used to transport sensitive information. In the Friends-only scenario a network of friends is trusted to transport news manually, simply carrying it around. Smartphones with NFC capability or manual USB transfer are used to duplicate and move messages. As direct social connections are sparse and proximity of friends is not continuous, the standard SHOULD facilitate usage of friends-of- friends or further removed social ties to relay news messages. This requires the development of a decentralised social network, for instance, with digital signatures of friendship certificates. However, information hiding techniques are probably essential in this scenarios. This scenario requires further discussion and expansion. 5. Security Considerations tbd. 6. IANA Considerations tbd. 7. References Pouwelse Expires January 10, 2013 [Page 6] Internet-Draft CensorFree July 2012 7.1. Normative References [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997. [RFC2578] McCloghrie, K., Ed., Perkins, D., Ed., and J. Schoenwaelder, Ed., "Structure of Management Information Version 2 (SMIv2)", STD 58, RFC 2578, April 1999. [RFC2579] McCloghrie, K., Ed., Perkins, D., Ed., and J. Schoenwaelder, Ed., "Textual Conventions for SMIv2", STD 58, RFC 2579, April 1999. [RFC2580] McCloghrie, K., Perkins, D., and J. Schoenwaelder, "Conformance Statements for SMIv2", STD 58, RFC 2580, April 1999. 7.2. Informative References [RFC3410] Case, J., Mundy, R., Partain, D., and B. Stewart, "Introduction and Applicability Statements for Internet- Standard Management Framework", RFC 3410, December 2002. [RFC4787] Audet, F. and C. Jennings, "Network Address Translation (NAT) Behavioral Requirements for Unicast UDP", BCP 127, RFC 4787, January 2007. 7.3. URL References [OPENMICRO] XEP-0277: Microblogging over XMPP, "http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html". Author's Address Johan Pouwelse (editor) Delft University of Technology Mekelweg 4 Delft The Netherlands Phone: +31 15 278 2539 EMail: J.A.pouwelse@tudelft.nl Pouwelse Expires January 10, 2013 [Page 7]