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Pakistan bans VPNs

tribune.com.pk

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Re: Pakistan bans VPNs

#31

Post by blake8086 »

waitwhat wrote: post #25
cosgroveb wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stego is detectable. They will move on to scanning for and flagging those communications eventually.

Stego is detectable. Only in the sense that "Crypto is breakable." The entire point of steganography is that it isn't detectable. If it can be detected, you need a better algorithm.

If you use steganography with plaintext, you're relying on security by obscurity. Governments aren't going to tell you when they've cracked your secret.

If you're encrypting your steganographic messages, you're increasing the entropy of the plaintext message you're concealing it in.

Re: Pakistan bans VPNs

#32

Post by praptak »

If Pakistani government can easily spy on the communications of their citizens, so can other organizations. Israel, India, Iran, to name a few of them.

Re: Pakistan bans VPNs

#33

Post by mcantelon »

jasonjei wrote: post #15

Apple obviously uses VPN in its non-Cupertino locations, presumably too with its production lines in China. I know that China allows the use of VPN for businesses with a legitimate need. Even though Pakistan was never an ideal location for doing business anyway, they've essentially banned any technical business from conducting operations in Pakistan.

...and obliterated their domestic cybersecurity. Stupid.

Re: Pakistan bans VPNs

#34

Post by dasil003 »

anamax wrote: post #27
dasil003 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think they would need to block those as well in order to be effective. Frankly I don't see how they could possibly get away with it. Businesses of any size can't run without encrypted channels. Proceeding with this seems sure way to smother any economic development and relegate the country to third-world backwater status for the foreseeable future. And is any world leader crazy enough to do that besides Kim Jo…

> Businesses of any size can't run without encrypted channels. Sure they can - they did before the internet. (No, the postal mail is not secure.) > Proceeding with this seems sure way to smother any economic development and relegate the country to third-world backwater status for the foreseeable future. And is any world leader crazy enough to do that besides Kim Jong-il? Pretty much every "world leader" in the last 1…

My wording was ambiguous, I should have said of any significant size.

Anyway, "some economic benefit" is the understatement of the year. A multinational simply can not do business without secure communications. History is irrelevant; Wells Fargo wrote out every transaction on a slip of paper and manually reconciled it every night 50 years ago, but to do so today would be utterly impossible. In todays global economy, countries need to be able to do business with foreign companies or they will be a backwater plain and simple. China certainly makes some of the tradeoffs you are talking about, but do they outright ban secure communications? Of course not, because that would be suicidal.

Re: Pakistan bans VPNs

#35

Post by omouse »

reginaldo wrote: post #7

The goal of the Pakistani government seems to be the complete obliteration of all private communications. But the only way to do that is by banning all communication. With the ban on VPNs, steganographic[1] techniques that make encrypted traffic look like regular traffic will become more and more common. The troubling thing is the fact that these techniques are somewhat hungry for bandwidth. [1] http://en.wikipedia.o…

Psh, you can still spread messages person to person, you know, in REAL LIFE. It's sad how we're all tied to the Internet and try to make it the first and foremost way in which we communicate.

Re: Pakistan bans VPNs

#36

Post by andreasvc »

blake8086 wrote: post #31
waitwhat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stego is detectable. Only in the sense that "Crypto is breakable." The entire point of steganography is that it isn't detectable. If it can be detected, you need a better algorithm.

If you use steganography with plaintext, you're relying on security by obscurity. Governments aren't going to tell you when they've cracked your secret. If you're encrypting your steganographic messages, you're increasing the entropy of the plaintext message you're concealing it in.

Solution: don't use it with plain text, but with compressed files such as photos and movies which have high entropy by virtue of their compression (if it is effective, that is).

Re: Pakistan bans VPNs

#37

Post by lukeschlather »

anamax wrote: post #27
dasil003 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think they would need to block those as well in order to be effective. Frankly I don't see how they could possibly get away with it. Businesses of any size can't run without encrypted channels. Proceeding with this seems sure way to smother any economic development and relegate the country to third-world backwater status for the foreseeable future. And is any world leader crazy enough to do that besides Kim Jo…

> Businesses of any size can't run without encrypted channels. Sure they can - they did before the internet. (No, the postal mail is not secure.) > Proceeding with this seems sure way to smother any economic development and relegate the country to third-world backwater status for the foreseeable future. And is any world leader crazy enough to do that besides Kim Jong-il? Pretty much every "world leader" in the last 1…

>Sure they can - they did before the internet. (No, the postal mail is not secure.)

It's several orders of magnitude more secure than plain http.

>Besides, the effect on economic development in the short term will be almost unnoticable.

India has to be chock full of nationalistic script kiddies and legitimate hackers who will have a field day wrecking Pakistan's online economy if they actually try to implement this plan.

Re: Pakistan bans VPNs

#38

Post by lallysingh »

omouse wrote: post #35
reginaldo wrote: post #7

The goal of the Pakistani government seems to be the complete obliteration of all private communications. But the only way to do that is by banning all communication. With the ban on VPNs, steganographic[1] techniques that make encrypted traffic look like regular traffic will become more and more common. The troubling thing is the fact that these techniques are somewhat hungry for bandwidth. [1] http://en.wikipedia.o…

Psh, you can still spread messages person to person, you know, in REAL LIFE . It's sad how we're all tied to the Internet and try to make it the first and foremost way in which we communicate.

Most governments only go to controlling online activity after controlling real-life activity. I don't know about Pakistan specifically, but typically the domestic "security" organizations are rather adept at tracking down groups who organize in meatspace.

Re: Pakistan bans VPNs

#39

Post by waitwhat »

blake8086 wrote: post #31
waitwhat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stego is detectable. Only in the sense that "Crypto is breakable." The entire point of steganography is that it isn't detectable. If it can be detected, you need a better algorithm.

If you use steganography with plaintext, you're relying on security by obscurity. Governments aren't going to tell you when they've cracked your secret. If you're encrypting your steganographic messages, you're increasing the entropy of the plaintext message you're concealing it in.

If you use steganography with plaintext, you're relying on security by obscurity.

No. It is perfectly possible to have steganographic keys, in the same way that you have cryptographic keys.

Trivial example: If the key is 7, the hidden message can be extracted by combining the least significant bits of every 7th pixel of an image. (Incidentally, that hidden message could also be, and indeed probably should also be, encrypted.)

For an example that's only slightly more complex but might actually be useful, replace "7" with a seeded CSPRNG.

you're increasing the entropy of the plaintext message you're concealing it in.

Yes. But you should still be able to conceal a low-bitrate secret message inside a high-entropy covertext/envelope/whatever-you-call-it without a significant chance of being detected.

Trivial example: With a good algorithm and a stick full of 1MB JPEGs, it shouldn't be possible for an attacker to determine which files contain a concealed (140-byte) tweet and which don't.

Re: Pakistan bans VPNs

#40

Post by maeon3 »

I'm not sure how banning VPN's is going to stop the terrorists. Don't they use cellphones to coordinate their strikes? You would have to stop the internet and all forms of communication to slow them down, and then still you wouldn't slow them down much. We gotta get "Right to bear encryption" next to "Right to bear arms" in the constitution/bill of rights.
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