The Clean Network | Hacker News Reader

The Clean Network

state.gov

This is poorly thought out. It’s clear that there were no actual experts in the room.

Trust is something we used to count on years ago. Since cryptography has gone mainstream, we don’t rely so much on trust but instead verification and zero knowledge systems.

Rather than the clean network, they should be making the Verified and Cryptographically private and secure network.

Admitting cryptography works means 2 things:

* people will use it and it will be harder for the US to spy on its own citizens and its "allies"

* people might buy superior Chinese products instead of inferior Americans ones. 5G is a perfect example of this.

Pages like these also allow the current administration to act tough without actually making any tough decisions or doing much...

Poorly thought out by a bunch of cold warriors that thought they could use America's centralized technological superiority to do damage to their perceived enemy, China. By labeling Chinese technology, network and apps as "unclean".

Of course the problem in that is that what if it is no longer you who decides what is clean and what is unclean? Wouldn't you then regret supporting a system that was hierarchy where an app store at the top could turn things on and off, rather than a network where no single authority is in control?

Of course these guys lacked the imagination to imagine that. And they certainly didn't think it would happen just 6 months later ...

You can't cryptographically verify that the system you are using doesn't have backdoors. For this, we rely on trust.

It is then only a matter of choosing who to trust with the backdoors into your system. You might have good reasons to prefer to trust a foreign government with the backdoors into your system, but that isn't true for the federal government.

> You can't cryptographically verify that the system you are using doesn't have backdoors

Yes you can, there are many methods including but not limited to SGX among other things.

SGX has critical flaws that may or may not have been put there intentionally. How do you "cryptographically verify" that such vulnerabilities do not exist?

To be able to exploit these "critical flaws" in SGX is quite difficult in the real world. That said, I agree that it could happen in extraordinary circumstances. If you fall under these extraordinary circumstances, you really shouldn't being using a computer identifiable to you in any serious kind of way nor connecting to anything you had ever historically connected to.

It's not about me, it's about government infrastructure. How do you procure a system that you don't have to trust, where you can rely on cryptography alone? It's simply not possible. It's not just about CPUs, but all the hardware that goes into running a network.

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24110992

Yeah. I thought it could be fun to revisit this legacy of the trump administration in light of recent events.

The terminology is unfortunate at best, deliberately racist at worst. Authoritarian nationalists' obsession with them being "clean" and others being "unclean" has a very sordid history. Even if they're misnomers, "secure" or "safe" would have been better, or any number of completely value-neutral names.

Why do you need to pretend things are racist when they aren't? IT and security use medical terms like 'viruses', and bad computers are 'wiped clean', so 'clean' is a common term and there's no reason to pretend that its intended to be racist. A clean network is a joke though and will fail

So you're pretending to read my mind and claiming without evidence that it's some sort of habit? Very convincing. I did say "at worst" didn't I? That's clearly meant to express that it's an extreme on a range of possible motives or interpretations. When there's a broad choice of equally accurate terms and one makes a choice of the one with certain associations, that choice itself can be a signal. Especially when "keeping out the Chinese" is clearly a major focus of the document. It's a possibility, and I stated no more than that.

This is insane-all the carriers listed in this program are globally connected and by definition China is connected to them as well. Therefore, access to cloud based services is easily achieved by their hackers. I spun up a small DNS service yesterday to test and the first IP address to hit it (within minutes) was from China. They are constantly scanning our networks.

It’s almost like the intention is to divide the world and create more segregation rather than to benefit any one group.

And the brand sounds very pretentious. Maybe “the trust network” would’ve been better. It’s simply a group where we all trust each other. It’s not any “cleaner” tbh.

The only clean network is one without Facebook, google and twitter. They are the primary spying apparatus

It’s a Trump program. Immediate pass.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com