Russia Preparing for MitM | Hacker News Reader

Russia Preparing for MitM

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83 pointsarkadiyt7 comments

Russia have run “disconnection” tests a number of times in the past. If they are forced to disconnect from the rest of the internet, they’d really want an authoritative CA on your net, with trust established for all users. Regardless of MitM possibilities, many things will fail with some CA to issue certificates. I see this more as ‘balkanization’ than ‘Stalinization’.

Those calling for total disconnection of Russia seem to be often missing a really important part: exclusion is only good when it works and is undone, otherwise it is shooting yourself in the foot. The excluded will suffer for a bit, then find a way to live with, work around and even exploit/deepen the exclusion. (Case in point: the OP.)

The integration of an actor into global financial, information systems provides leverage and control. The world historically tried to include even the bad guys for that reason.

Meanwhile, EU/US have not given themselves an escape hatch to reverse the sanctions. If Putin stops because tanks ran out of fuel, does it mean Putin is no longer a bad guy so the country can be included again? Hardly something the wording of sanctions would allow.

What about having more western stuff published onto IPFS? As long as there are one or two nodes in Russia that can get any content it can be easily spread.

Here's the tricky question: how do you let journalism out (and truth in) of Russia without letting Putin out? How far down could we go in the OSI stack?

If you really wanted to raise some new hairs on Putin you'd disconnect the trunk, but there would be suffering. Could we invent a best of both?

Radio is attractive, but can be detected and triangulated (although receiving is fine). Plausible deniability (high entropy signals) is a theory. How do we exfiltrate?

I talked with some Russians who assumed their country would unpeer with the West. I asked about Starlink and they were pessimistic, saying that the receivers would be banned and smuggling them in wouldn't work. An extremely severe and depressing prediction, but who knows these days..

If things truly did get that bad.. Setup a number of highly focused/directional wifi links near the border, ideally with irregular transmission schedules to make it harder to catch. Use a popular decentralized multiplayer game's protocol (e.g. Minecraft) as cover for P2P requesting and distributing content.

Are satellite phones an option? Although it may be very expensive. Or what if we broadcast some kind of long range radio signal that can be read even if its not written to. Something in binary that can be consumed digitally - say we broadcast the source code for some useful tools, or simply news. I am making this up as i type but maybe there is some sort of software that takes in radio signal, converts it into binary data and can be used on regular pcs.

> Something in binary that can be consumed digitally

You might want to spend some time reading about signal theory.

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