Internet DRAFT - draft-hallambaker-iab-aggregation
draft-hallambaker-iab-aggregation
Network Working Group P. Hallam-Baker
Internet-Draft May 12, 2019
Intended status: Informational
Expires: November 13, 2019
Business Models for Content Aggregation
draft-hallambaker-iab-aggregation-00
Abstract
This document is also available online at
http://mathmesh.com/Documents/draft-hallambaker-iab-aggregation.html
[1] .
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Table of Contents
1. Where the Web failed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. How users pay for content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2. Concentration and its Consequences . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.3. User experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.4. The wider context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2. The Technology Gap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.1. Content Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.2. Payments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3. Mathematical Mesh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.1. Management of private keys across devices . . . . . . . . 9
3.2. Dare Container . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.3. Creator-to-consumer end-to-end Web security. . . . . . . 10
3.4. Deployment strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.5. Shared Bookmarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
4. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
4.1. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
4.2. URIs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1. Where the Web failed
Many if not most technologies that came to define the era in which
they were created owe a large part of their success to the failed
expectations of the technologies that immediately preceded them. The
telegraph and canals demonstrated the potential, but radio and the
railways defined their age. The World Wide Web was fortunate to
arrive at the exact moment that home trials of Interactive TV had
shown it to be an expensive flop.
Apart from the name, the only part of Interactive TV that was
'interactive' was the ability to buy branded merchandise associated
with a program. Interactive TV did little more than add a 'purchase'
button to the remote control. The Web in contrast offered much more
because any user of the Web could become a content provider.
It is with no little irony therefore that thirty years later, the Web
has largely become the thing it was meant to destroy and a large part
of the reason we have come to this point is the lack of a 'purchase'
button on the remote control.
1.1. How users pay for content
Producing high quality content is an expensive business. The
question therefore is not whether users will pay for content but
rather how they will pay for content. They can pay directly, they
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can pay by giving their attention, they can pay by giving up
information they own but they will pay one way or another.
At the time the Web was begun, the dominant business model for
television was paid advertising and so it was perhaps natural that
the early evolution of the Web followed this model. This choice was
not for want of consideration of other choices, proposals for Web
micropayments were made as early as 1993 and presented in technical
form in 1995. But advertising was the model understood by the
established content providers and so advertising was the business
model that they assumed they would eventually turn to when it finally
came time to monetize the audiences they were developing. The HTTP
referer field was originally introduced as a means of supporting
advertising through a performance-based model before the addition of
client-state (cookies) to the protocol.
In the event of course, the Web cannibalized classified advertising
and many of the other revenue streams that established content
providers had built their business on. By the time the need to
monetize was understood it was too late to develop new protocols or
infrastructures to support new business models. Having trained Web
users to expect that content is free, many content providers turned
to increasingly aggressive advertising presentations. Even today it
is not unusual to find Web site designs that leave the user trying to
read articles a few sentences at a time on a screen where 90% of the
pixels are occupied by advertising.
The crucial flaw that the content providers did not anticipate is
that content discovery is a vastly more attractive platform for
advertisers than content provision. Web search engine providers
offer a predictable, verifiable return on an advertising investment
that can be tightly focused to specific audiences. Few content
providers can compete and even those that can are at a disadvantage
because click-fraud and other scams are rife in the content provider
advertising market.
1.2. Concentration and its Consequences
According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, online advertising
saw a 22% year on year growth in 2018 [iab-avertising-2019] . As in
previous years, the headline numbers show great potential, but the
details show a market that is dysfunctional and ultimately
unsustainable. Ten companies account for three quarters of all the
advertising revenues in 2018 and desktop revenues are actually
declining. Examination of the earnings reports of Facebook and
Google over the same period indicate that the concentration is even
more pronounced, and that content discovery is responsible for the
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majority of advertising revenues and this portion is rising while
revenues for content providers are flat or falling.
While the current situation is certainly good for the dominant
content discovery services in short term, it is clearly
unsustainable. Content discovery is worthless unless there is
content to be discovered.
Whether this dysfunction in the market is ultimately resolved through
regulatory action, technical changes or both, it is clear that change
is inevitable. Nor are the opinions of one particular legislation in
one particular country constrained by one particular ideology going
to be dispositive in this regard. The Web is a global infrastructure
and is regulated as such. The deployment of GDPR in the EU has
proved that regulatory arbitrage works in both directions and
especially so when control is concentrated in a small number of
enterprises.
1.3. User experience
When Cascading Style Sheets were first proposed in 1994, the design
goal was to enable users to control the presentation of information
to best suit their needs. Needless to say, this goal is long since
forgotten as the user has been transformed from customer to product.
This conception of user-as-product is most apparent in the design of
social media properties such as Facebook where the ability of the
user to interact is ruthlessly constrained. Users are given the
absolute bare minimum of control over their environment possible so
as to maintain the illusion of participation.
Limiting the modes of user interaction was probably one of the
essential innovations required for social media to scale before users
were used to the modality. But is it necessary now? When social
media was new to most users, an environment that only allowed
favorable responses to posts provided a welcoming impression. Today
it means that there is no tool I can use to tell facebook that I do
not wish to see material that is bigoted, ignorant or intentionally
misleading unless the material is so egregious as to merit a report.
The core failure here is that the Web only allows Web designers to
create compelling user experiences for their users. The Web does not
allow users to create compelling user experiences for themselves.
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1.4. The wider context
IETF Working Groups are traditionally established with a charter
focused on a scope that is as narrowly focused as possible so as to
minimize both the time taken to arrive at consensus and the
implementation burden. While well intentioned, it is important to
recognize that narrowing the problem scope necessarily reduces the
incentives for early adopters.
One of the chief difficulties in developing any new Web technology is
that the incumbent technology and content providers are focused on
serving a global market of several billion users. New technologies
are of little interest unless they provide immediate access to
millions of users at the very least. It is useful therefore to
consider non-commercial applications with similar requirements and in
particular specialist applications serving small communities that may
be highly motivated to deploy.
One area that is currently poorly served is the basis for most IETF
work: mailing lists. While mailing lists represented the pinnacle of
technology in the 1980s, they are long past their prime. Every
member of a mailing list receives a copy of every message on every
one of their devices that reads mail through a dedicated MUA. The
affordances for subscribing to (and unsubscribing!) from mailing
lists are ad hoc contrivances and there is no support for end-to-end
security with respect to either confidentiality or integrity.
Another area that is underserved is bulletin boards and forums. One
of the reasons that social media has become highly concentrated is
that bulletin boards represent isolated islands which many users only
ever encounter by chance. It is unlikely many people would discover
that a site called Dewback Wing is the place to find plans for
building an copy of the original Enterprise Captain's Chair unless
someone who already knew this told them. It is highly unlikely many
people would know that such a guide even existed.
2. The Technology Gap
That the Web does not provide an ideal user experience for users is
proved by the fact that most major content providers have developed
special purpose mobile apps to view the content they provide. Such
apps allow the content provider to control every aspect of the
presentation of the content to the user but rarely provide much if
any incentive for the user. Randall Monroe's summary of the user
proposition is still accurate: "Want to visit an incomplete version
of our Web site where you can't zoom? Download our app!".
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Equally problematic is the fact that few mobile apps support
hypertext linking and those that do rarely refer the user to the
corresponding mobile app if installed. So, despite the fact that
most mobile apps are merely a thin veneer on a captive browser, they
are a dead end as far as the network hypertext model goes.
One of the few benefits that some mobile apps provide is the ability
to read content in offline mode. But this is rarely implemented in
2.1. Content Interaction
One of the core technology advances that is implicit in the workshop
scope is the development of a generic application that serves as a
reader for aggregate content. For the purposes of discussion, it is
assumed such an application would be separate from but tightly
coupled to Web and News clients and share the same library
foundations.
Such a client should provide for user interaction and not just
passive consumption of content and should put the user in direct
control of their user experience selecting the information sources
and the filtering criteria for content delivery.
It is important to remember that just as Facebook is merely USENET on
steroids, the next major advance in social networking might be merely
a new twist on an old theme.
For example, shared bookmarking has been explored in the past but is
currently in abeyance. Let us imagine that Alice, Bob and a few
thousand close friends use a browser that allows them to bookmark Web
pages as they view and nominate pages of interest (with optional
annotations). The users might make their trails publicly visible or
limit distribution through access control. The curated feeds
generated through such a system might in turn be read by a separate
constituency of curators who would use them to predict content that
their subscribers might be interested in on the basis of their
trails.
This model is very close to what we see in social media today but
with one crucial difference: the user chooses their feed curators and
can switch at any time. This might be a step towards restoring the
balance between content provision and content discovery since users
can subscribe to multiple curations of their feeds and drop those
which provide too little that is of interest or too much that is
objectionable.
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2.2. Payments
The biggest gap in current Web technology is that payment for content
is largely limited to supporter and subscription models. This
provides a viable business proposition for content providers offering
material important enough to be worth $30 a year or more. But there
is little support for the far more numerous content providers
publishing individual articles.
Credit card payment for individual articles disrupts the user
experience. But payment systems that are too seamless become rife
with fraud as the situation with premium rate telephone calling
demonstrates.
One mechanism that might grow the market for paid content is a model
in which subscribers to one content provider would receive no-cost
access to normally paid content on other sites with a system of
settlements to share revenues. For example, Alice subscribes to
Bob's Boy-Band fanzine which has a link to an article on Carol's
Concert Club reviewing the band. Since she is a subscriber to BBB,
Alice doesn't need to pay to view the article, but Carol receives a
small settlement from Bob.
The precise details of the settlements system can probably be left to
market forces, provided that the technology provides the necessary
information and security controls.
3. Mathematical Mesh
The Mathematical Mesh is a cryptographic infrastructure designed to
make the Internet easier to use by making it more secure.
Many if not most of the frustrations users suffer when using Internet
applications today can be traced back to use of security systems that
are poorly designed and woefully implemented. Passwords are
difficult and expensive for users to use at the best of times.
Correctly applied, public key cryptography offers the highest level
of practical security with no compulsory impact on the user
experience. A security protocol that requires user effort is a
protocol that isn't going to be used. A security protocol should
provide security without getting in the user's way or demanding their
attention. The only time when a security protocol should affect the
user experience is when the user has a security concern at which
point the application should provide the user with the information
they need to make a security decision in a form they can understand.
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Like the Web, the Mesh is a collection of interdependent
technologies, some of which are outside the scope of this workshop.
The features of the Mesh that are relevant to the workshop scope
include:
o The ability to provision keys to all the Mesh-enabled devices
owned or controlled by the user. These include desktop, laptop,
mobile and IoT devices.
o The ability to share 'catalogs' comprising sets of data entries
between devices. These include catalogs of bookmarks, passwords
and calendar items.
o A cryptographic container format that may be used as either an
archive format or as a syndication format.
o A end-to-end secure infrastructure for short messages.
Realizing these capabilities securely requires the use of
cryptographic techniques not currently supported by OpenPGP [RFC4880]
or CMS [RFC5652] . Rather than attempting to construct end-to-end
security guarantees as a layer on top of an application protocol
(e.g. S/MIME over SMTP), the Mesh is built on a presentation layer
(DARE) that provides end-to-end security by default.
The academic field of cryptography has grown exponentially as a
result of the Web and as a result of the market for commercial
cryptography. But the cryptographic repertoire employed in IETF
protocols remains unchanged since the closure of the PEM working
group. We have improved signature, digest and encryption algorithms
and we have formalized the definition of key wrapping and key
derivation. But we do not use any new cryptographic primitives
beyond the original canon.
Moving from one key cryptography to two revolutionized the
information security field. Use of separate keys for encryption and
decryption enables the encryption role to be separated from the
decryption role. The Mesh makes use of public key protocols that
make use of three keys and more.
The Mesh enforces cryptographic hygiene making use of separate keys
for separate purposes and for separate applications and for separate
devices. This results in a lot of keys but the consistency of
requiring every system to apply a common set of best practices
affords the simplicity necessary to make the system practical.
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3.1. Management of private keys across devices
The core of the Mesh is the ability to securely manage sets of
cryptographic keys across multiple devices with minimal user
interaction. Almost every well-formed information security problem
has a simple cryptographic solution provided that every device
belonging to a user has a unique public key pair and the public keys
belonging to the devices are known.
The chief obstacle to using public key-based authentication in place
of password credentials is that while every device that a user might
use to surf the Web has an affordance for password entry, almost none
allow entry of a private key. Nor is this likely to change as
devices become smaller and less likely to provide a standardized
means of introducing a smart card or token.
The Mesh provides a personal PKI which allows the user to provision
device-specific authentication credentials to every device they
'connect' to their personal Mesh. This is combined with an end-to-
end secure password manager which permits devices connected to a
personal Mesh to access the user's legacy credentials.
Public key pairs are provisioned in the Mesh using a co-generation
approach based on work by Matt Blaze and Torben Pedersen. Every
device has a unique set of device key pairs that are either generated
on the device itself or provisioned during manufacture. When a
device is connected to a user's profile, a second set of key pairs is
generated by the user's administration device. It is the combination
of the two sets of keys that is used to perform every Mesh function
on the device. This provides protection against a single point of
failure.
3.2. Dare Container
Data At Rest Encryption [draft-hallambaker-mesh-dare] is a
cryptographic message syntax based on JSON/JOSE that provides a set
of capabilities that may be loosely described as 'blockchain with
encryption'. As with Certificate Transparency [RFC6962] ,
incremental integrity checking may be provided by a Merkle Tree.
Incremental encryption is also supported allowing a single key
exchange to be applied to multiple container entries by means of a
uniquely salted Key Derivation Function [RFC5869]
Dare Container is used within the Mesh to support creation of
catalogs (which contain sets of items) and spools (which contain
queues of messages). The features it supports are also well suited
for use as a syndication format or an archive format.
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There are clear advantages to employing an archive format designed to
support encryption and authentication. The Dare format allows large
numbers of entries of any size (up to 2^63 bytes) to be encrypted
under a single public key exchange and authenticated by means of a
single signature. Furthermore, containers may be redacted to drop
entries that are irrelevant or have been updated without affecting
confidentiality or integrity.
This approach allows the same technology to be applied to package as
a single file:
o A Web page consisting of a base HTML document, CSS style sheets,
scripts and transcluded images.
o A Web site consisting of multiple base HTML documents referencing
a shared set of images and scripts.
o Entries in a discussion on a Web page.
Furthermore, containers may be aggregated or redacted as required. A
container describing an individual page may be extracted from a
container describing a site and containers describing multiple pages
may be combined to form a site.
3.3. Creator-to-consumer end-to-end Web security.
Since the release of TLS in 1994, Web security has focused on
securing data in transit. HTTPS is used to protect the provisioning
of new content to Web servers and for distribution of the content
from the Web server to the reader. But the content itself sits in
the clear in the cloud. As a result, almost every disclosure breach
is a breach of data at rest.
The Mesh provides true Data At Rest security by applying key
splitting techniques to the private key used to decrypt data. As
with existing CRM schemes, these techniques allow an administrator to
grant or remove access privileges to data stored on a remote server.
Unlike existing techniques, no decryption keys are stored on the
server itself. A breach of the server only results in disclosure of
encrypted data and some random numbers.
3.4. Deployment strategy
The first stage in that strategy is focused on applications that
deliver value to individual users even if there are no other users of
the Mesh. Management of credentials and keys across multiple devices
is such an application. Management of usernames and passwords is
tedious for everyone. Commercial password managers are expensive and
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currently offer vague security guarantees at best. The Mesh is an
open specification that offers true end-to-end security with seamless
ease of use. Management of OpenPGP, S/MIME and SSH keys pose similar
challenges. While every system manager uses SSH it is a very rare
administrator who bothers to generate separate keypairs for each of
their devices and even rarer that they delete device keys after a
device is decommissioned.
The second stage is to focus on applications that deliver value to
compact groups of users within a niche community. The CRM
capabilities of the Mesh are likely to be of interest within
enterprises focused on health care, defense and other industries
where maintaining confidentiality is more important than direct
interoperation with other enterprises. The Mesh also provides an
improvement on traditional second factor authentication schemes which
allows the relying party to ask for confirmation of specific actions
for specific purposes and for a non-repudiable audit trail of every
interaction to be maintained.
The final stage of the deployment strategy is to join up the
communities of users established in phase two to form a sufficient
critical mass to change the Internet as a whole.
3.5. Shared Bookmarks
The shared bookmarks environment described in this paper is a part of
the second phase of the Mesh deployment strategy. A large part of
the value proposition offered by Facebook to users is the ability to
share links to Web content and to comment on them.
The Mesh allows bookmarks to be shared and commented on within closed
groups of users such as a group of employees within a company or
researchers within a field.
While existing social media allows users to establish closed groups,
ownership of those groups ultimately rests with the social media
platform and not the members of the groups themselves. Vesting
ownership of the group in its members allows the membership to have
control over the selection of administrators and moderators and the
criteria for posting and admission to the group.
Furthermore, selection of articles to view may be made by each
individual member using the tools and platforms of their choice that
best serve their needs.
The content that is prioritized on such platforms today is the
content that maximizes engagement and mouse clicks. The hatemonger,
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the crank and the disinformation warrior are chosen because their
lies generate more engagement than facts or expert opinion.
4. References
4.1. Informative References
[draft-hallambaker-mesh-dare]
Hallam-Baker, P., "Mathematical Mesh Part III : Data At
Rest Encryption (DARE)", draft-hallambaker-mesh-dare-01
(work in progress), April 2019.
[iab-avertising-2019]
"[Reference Not Found!]".
[RFC4880] Callas, J., Donnerhacke, L., Finney, H., Shaw, D., and R.
Thayer, "OpenPGP Message Format", RFC 4880,
DOI 10.17487/RFC4880, November 2007.
[RFC5652] Housley, R., "Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS)", STD 70,
RFC 5652, DOI 10.17487/RFC5652, September 2009.
[RFC5869] Krawczyk, H. and P. Eronen, "HMAC-based Extract-and-Expand
Key Derivation Function (HKDF)", RFC 5869,
DOI 10.17487/RFC5869, May 2010.
[RFC6962] Laurie, B., Langley, A., and E. Kasper, "Certificate
Transparency", RFC 6962, DOI 10.17487/RFC6962, June 2013.
4.2. URIs
[1] http://mathmesh.com/Documents/draft-hallambaker-iab-
aggregation.html
Author's Address
Phillip Hallam-Baker
Email: phill@hallambaker.com
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