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More on Feudal Security

schneier.com

99 pointsonosendai27 comments

This is why you're going to start to see a shift away from centralized cloud applications like Facebook towards more federated models. The federated model is the only workable compromise between the security afforded by completely peer-to-peer solutions and the enormous convenience of completely centralized solutions. That's why every single protocol still in wide use after many years of existence is either a federated protocol or a variation on federation (SMTP, XMPP, IRC, DNS, and to some extent, HTTP). The internet by its nature is a federated system.

People will be more inclined to trust institutions with which they associate in real life with their data. I don't mind if my company, of which I am a part owner, houses my social data, and federates with other co-equal organizations to generate a public social graph. I do mind that a company in which I have no stake and over which I have no control houses that same data (i.e. Facebook).

I think someone will come along, Diaspora or someone else, and create a viable Facebook competitor that is federated and it will take off for this very reason. It has to be as good as, or better than, Facebook as a platform for it to succeed, but it is not impossible.

Anything that replaces Facebook will have to be significantly better in at least one major way that matters to people, and not just nerds. But that's definitely an achievable goal.

In the meantime, I'd really like to see a greater focus on encryption of data. For example, think of the possibilities if we had full PKI support built into the browser, such that private messages could actually be private.

Correct. The "significantly better", for better or worse, is likely to be "allows you to share content with your friends that you aren't really allowed to by law".

This is probably the only single thing that a federated network can offer that would appeal to non-geeks, at least at first. One might hope that people might "come for the piracy/porn, stay for the free speech".

The problem is that Facebook, like the www, succeeds because it is not a private platform, it is mostly public, and it has arrived near ubiquity. This is a feature, not a bug, as they say. It seems to me that encryption is totally incompatible with these two aspects. Unless I'm missing something...

Plus if the U.S. is not very careful (e.g. by establishing bilateral warrant requirements for some of our allies) I suspect they'll see the E.U. and Asia-Pacific nations starting to develop and adopt federated protocols en masse to workaround the threat of things like FISA.

That leaves the option of neutral (or enemy) states creating their own data-haven legal environments. How far you go in trusting those is an open question, but then again, 'ly' was a popular CCTLD there even before the Arab Spring.

Well a .ly pointing to a U.S. datacenter is still going to end badly for those trying to avoid NSA intercept.

That's the point of "Federation" by the way. Obviously people could store their data on a machine in a given country, the idea is that federated protocols inherently support that type of arrangement. There's no real way to point something like your Facebook login to be a "Generic Social Media" login to a social network provider of your choice, much like you can point your DNS to your preferred email provider.

I think many people find comfort in the idea of a central authority that they can address with their grievances even if it is mostly futile.

I saw a documentary on "cyber bullying" some years back and parents were calling for more oversight, more censorship and more monitoring "people shouldn't just be allowed to say mean things on facebook!".

A centralised facebook can at least ban members, block imposters , anonymous troll accounts and cooperate with law enforcement if necessary.

Under a federated model this becomes much more difficult, if anyone can run a node on the network then the 4chan nodes can connect to the nodes used by people to share their baby photos.

I've always envisioned an encrypted system where only people you've authorized can decrypt things you share, assuming you haven't let your keys leak. Users area defined by a key-pair. But I really hope people get used to the idea that you can't control where information goes once it's in the wild, otherwise the social Internet will be nothing but pain.

Federation implies certain things can't be done that centralized systems can do. The most obvious is deleting or editing a message after you sent it, which works on a social network but not for email. (In theory, email could support versioning, but not deleting the old version, because once you send a message it doesn't belong to you.)

This can make federated systems harder to build and centralized systems harder to keep up with on features. But perhaps some day we'll get there.

You should check out Tent. It's a very promising protocol for social networking. Their docs are at http://tent.io and you can see an example implementation at http://tent.is.

I think looking at the economics of things is likely to give you a clearer picture, rather than feudal society.

Indeed. Feudal society would have been very different if any eighteen year old whiz kid could start up his own manor and attract five million peasants over the course of two years and three venture capital cycles.

I don't mean this sarcastically or anything like that. Could help me understand what is wrong about what my taxonomy below?

18 year old kid = vassal

customers = serfs

venture capital = feudal lords

The feudal concept has been pretty obvious(at least to me in my own reasoning) for at least 3 years now for me. That said I'm not an expert but that is my take right now.

Maybe that analogy could have some merit, but it is decidedly not the analogy that Schneier uses in his article. By putting forth your own take in this way, you are likely to derail the discussion without contributing anything other than your own grievance.

Your attempt at an analogy should be discussed separately, if you think you can substantiate it.

In a way, I think he is looking at the economics via this analogy.

In Feudal Europe, the greatest economic resource was land. If you controlled lots of land, you had lots of power. But land was expensive to maintain and make productive. There was a lot of overhead, so merely owning it wouldn't make you rich. The feudal arrangement was that lords contracted the land out to vassals, who then employed serfs to work it. Protection and convenience flowed down, and in return wealth flowed up.

Now the greatest economic resource is information, and controlling it gives you power. But producing information in a top-down manner is ineffective, so in return for protection and convenience, the serf-users of the internet age produce a wealth of information for their lords. The main difference in the power relationship seems to be that modern serf-users are free to choose their lords, leading to greater competition among rival lords, whereas feudal serfs were born into the service of a single vassal, who in turn served a single lord.

You can't choose though. There is no viable alternative to Facebook, so it's either that or nothing. Not much of a choise really.

The importance of Facebook to modern life is probably not the same as land for a medieval peasant.

I get his point, but he lazily lumps in Chromebooks and Android phones with Apple. Google specifically permits user control over their devices, down to including a switch on the ChromeBook to disable boot-locking. It encourages hacking and sells unlocked devices (Nexus) Android devices can install apps from third party non-Play stores, etc.

Also, what does dropping support for Reader have to do with privacy? I mean, must Reader be dragged into every conversation, even when it isn't relevant?

Many many years ago, when minicomputers were going away, a fellow who wrote the sysadmin column for the DG users group magazine compared the disappearing environments to semi-benevolent dictatorships: if DEC got too oppressive, you could flee across the border to DG or Prime, and so on. He pointed out that you were much more on your own in the anarchic client-server world.

> We now use our vendor-controlled computing devices to go places. All of these places are owned by someone.

What's so different about that, compared to 20 years ago? We used AOL or Compuserve. Internet sites were almost all owned by universities or a small number of companies.

> I can't delete cookies on my iPad or ensure that files are securely erased. Updates on my Kindle happen automatically, without my knowledge or consent.

Again - you couldn't erase your history on Prodigy or MSN. If you didn't update your dialer/client you were eventually locked out.

Most people do a lot more stuff "in the cloud", 20 years ago desktop software was used a lot more.

> I can't delete cookies on my iPad

Hmm. I do it all the time.

>And, finally, don't be extreme in any way: politically, socially, culturally.

I strongly disagree with this, not just on principle, but also practically. There is always an extreme.

Not only that, but "extreme" is a moving target. "Normal" in today's environment might well be considered "extreme" by whoever holds power ten years from today.

Mrrdyn Embrys(sp? Welsh?) Merlin, and owl Archimedes, deep and unknown in the Nottingham forest, a linux wizard, magically has an empty satchel filled with new glorious bitcoin! Leaving the stymied corrupt well armed sheriff disconcertingly pissed and helpless.

"The great thing about a constant, is you can break other things, and see how they tick! Hoot! Hoot!"

-Archimedes(the Owl)

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