FSF: GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance and give us a way to fight back
FSF: GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance and give us a way to fight back
The Free Software Foundation blog has posted an article detailing a
newly discovered government surveillance project as well as a new
technological countermeasure. The surveillance project is known as
HACIENDA, as is reportedly a multi-national effort "to map every
server in twenty-seven countries, employing a technique known as port
scanning.
" The countermeasure, developed by Julian Kirsch,
Christian Grothoff, Jacob Appelbaum, and Holger Kenn, is called TCP Stealth. According
to the TCP Stealth whitepaper, the system "replaces the
traditional random TCP SQN number with a token that authenticates the
client and (optionally) the first bytes of the TCP payload. Clients
and servers can enable TCP Stealth by explicitly setting a socket
option or linking against a library that wraps existing network system
calls.
" A Linux implementation of the scheme is available.