Comment by JdeBP | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JdeBP | Hacker News Reader

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That's because you are glossing over a lot of packet inspection deeper than the TCP level with a glib "Read the HTTP request".

You might want to think about existing surveillance systems. Analysis of telephone traffic is often done purely on the CDR (the caller, callee, and length of call, in simple terms) without the equivalent of deep packet inspection to read the HTTP request, which would be analysis of the actual audio data themselves. The HTTPS case would likewise need just the total octets transferred over the TCP connection for fingerprinting.

There's a lot of glib handwaving in this discussion about identical sizes, not based upon actual measurements of the Debian archive. I quickly looked at the package cache in one of my Debian machines:

    jdebp% ls -l|awk 'x[$5]++'
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root      3314 Feb 16  2018 nosh-run-freedesktop-system-bus_1.37_amd64.deb
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root     35190 Dec 14  2016 redo_1.3_amd64.deb
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1114546 Feb 25  2018 udev_232-25+deb9u2_amd64.deb
    jdebp %

It turns out that in practice size alone almost does uniquely identify package in this sample. The other file that is 35190 bytes is version 1.2 of the same package, leaving just 2 possible ambiguities out of 847 packages. It seems likely that this holds after encryption as well.

So the remaining question is how much HTTP pipelining ameliorates this, which no-one here has yet actually analysed.

I'm not sure I understand your reply. Are you replying to me as if I said that determined attackers cannot trace back HTTPS traffic to individual APT packages? Because I said no such thing.

I just made the distinction between casual eavesdroppers and determined attackers. Those determined attackers exist and are quite capable, I'm sure. I said as much in my post.

You might also want to look into your use of the word 'glib' here. I find it an uncharitable interpretation of my post to call it 'glib' or 'glib handwaving', to be honest. Makes it seem to me as if I should be defending something I said, but I'm not sure what.

There's really no difference between a "casual" eavesdropper and a "serious" one. In what world do you live in where the former camp even exists? No one is casually spying on your apt updates, and anyone who is "seriously" spying on your apt updates can trivially manage to identify them by size. HTTPs really doesn't add anything here.

Of course no-one is spying casually on HTTP APT traffic specifically. Nobody is arguing that strawman - nobody here is "living in that world", give me some credit please.

But people spying casually on HTTP traffic in general do exist. People able to spy on HTTP traffic in general casually is one of the main reasons we care about HTTPS in the first place. Even though people can do a targeted content length analysis for nearly all other the stuff we read/watch/download online, too. We still care about HTTPS for all of that. And we should probably care for that with APT too, if only a little bit.

TL;DR HTTPS gives you potentially more confidentiality but not guaranteed as known vulnerability exists which an advanced attacker can exploit. You should not assume confidentiality when using APT over HTTPS. The severity of this issue in a CVSS is going to be very low because it is only an information leak.

What?

ISPs, for example, eavesdrop us all the time, and they do it quite casually. They will modify your unprotected HTTP requests, inject ads, log everything they are able to, and sell the data if they can.

Wouldn't help. If almost all of the files' sizes are unique (I'm pretty sure compressed package sizes aren't even block-aligned), and you know the sizes ahead of time, and you can make test requests for samples of what headers are being sent/received, it's trivial to calculate which combination of packages would result in a given stream length using pipelining. You'd have to add countermeasures like padding or fake data.

You could quantize these with up to 10% padding and cause a very large number of collisions, but that wouldn't be useful without HTTPS. Is the core argument that privacy is not attainable, or that it is not valuable?

I think the core argument first of all is that it is not attainable trivially by "just using HTTPS". So it's a question of costs vs. benefits, where the costs are pretty big (change the whole infrastructure).

This is wrong. A great deal more privacy is attainable by trivially using HTTPS. Privacy in the presence of stream inspection is more difficult, but attainable by padding files to have quantized lengths.

You are entirely incorrect in this instance, for all the reasons laid out in this thread.

Looking at stream sizes is not "advanced deep packet inspection", it's in fact the opposite of that.

Up to 10% padding likely isn't sufficient to provide privacy. Think of the long tail of large packages.

Quantizing up to 10% collapses 43,000 values into 120. It's not perfect but it removes a huge amount of information.

How do you arrive at 120? I guess that makes sense if the biggest packages is within 92709x (1.1^120) the size of the smallest. But that doesn't seem like enough range, just eyeballing it. If you have a 1kB package at the low end, I'd be surprised if Debian didn't have a package bigger than 92 MB.

Presenting it as 120 from 43,000 is a bit of an oversimplification, because the average isn't meaningful. The long tail is going to have the worst privacy and the small packages will (probably) have the most.

A scheme like this might be workable but requires being really careful about the security properties you're claiming (i.e., of those 120, probably half are unique, large packages). And obviously, this scheme requires up to 10% additional bandwidth, in the case of the chosen 10% threshold. If buckets change over time, packages moving between buckets may leak a lot of information.

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