| Rfc | 8280 |
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| Title | Research into Human Rights Protocol Considerations |
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| Author | N. ten Oever, C.
Cath |
|---|
| Date | October 2017 |
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| Format: | TXT, HTML |
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| Updated by | RFC9620 |
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| Status: | INFORMATIONAL |
|---|
|
Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) N. ten Oever
Request for Comments: 8280 ARTICLE 19
Category: Informational C. Cath
ISSN: 2070-1721 Oxford Internet Institute
October 2017
Research into Human Rights Protocol Considerations
Abstract
This document aims to propose guidelines for human rights
considerations, similar to the work done on the guidelines for
privacy considerations (RFC 6973). The other parts of this document
explain the background of the guidelines and how they were developed.
This document is the first milestone in a longer-term research
effort. It has been reviewed by the Human Rights Protocol
Considerations (HRPC) Research Group and also by individuals from
outside the research group.
Status of This Memo
This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
published for informational purposes.
This document is a product of the Internet Research Task Force
(IRTF). The IRTF publishes the results of Internet-related research
and development activities. These results might not be suitable for
deployment. This RFC represents the consensus of the Human Rights
Protocol Considerations Research Group of the Internet Research Task
Force (IRTF). Documents approved for publication by the IRSG are not
a candidate for any level of Internet Standard; see Section 2 of
RFC 7841.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8280.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2017 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................4
2. Vocabulary Used .................................................6
3. Research Questions .............................................12
4. Literature and Discussion Review ...............................12
5. Methodology ....................................................15
5.1. Data Sources ..............................................17
5.1.1. Discourse Analysis of RFCs .........................17
5.1.2. Interviews with Members of the IETF Community ......17
5.1.3. Participant Observation in Working Groups ..........17
5.2. Data Analysis Strategies ..................................18
5.2.1. Identifying Qualities of Technical Concepts
That Relate to Human Rights ........................18
5.2.2. Relating Human Rights to Technical Concepts ........20
5.2.3. Mapping Cases of Protocols, Implementations, and
Networking Paradigms That Adversely Impact Human
Rights or Are Enablers Thereof .....................21
6. Model for Developing Human Rights Protocol Considerations ......40
6.1. Human Rights Threats ......................................40
6.2. Guidelines for Human Rights Considerations ................42
6.2.1. Connectivity .......................................43
6.2.2. Privacy ............................................43
6.2.3. Content Agnosticism ................................44
6.2.4. Security ...........................................45
6.2.5. Internationalization ...............................46
6.2.6. Censorship Resistance ..............................47
6.2.7. Open Standards .....................................48
6.2.8. Heterogeneity Support ..............................50
6.2.9. Anonymity ..........................................51
6.2.10. Pseudonymity ......................................51
6.2.11. Accessibility .....................................53
6.2.12. Localization ......................................53
6.2.13. Decentralization ..................................54
6.2.14. Reliability .......................................55
6.2.15. Confidentiality ...................................56
6.2.16. Integrity .........................................58
6.2.17. Authenticity ......................................59
6.2.18. Adaptability ......................................60
6.2.19. Outcome Transparency ..............................61
7. Security Considerations ........................................61
8. IANA Considerations ............................................61
9. Research Group Information .....................................62
10. Informative References ........................................62
Acknowledgements ..................................................80
Authors' Addresses ................................................81
1. Introduction
"There's a freedom about the Internet: As long as we accept the rules
of sending packets around, we can send packets containing anything to
anywhere." [Berners-Lee]
"The Internet isn't value-neutral, and neither is the IETF."
[RFC3935]
The ever-growing interconnectedness of the Internet and society
increases the impact of the Internet on the lives of individuals.
Because of this, the design and development of the Internet
infrastructure also have a growing impact on society. This has led
to a broad recognition that human rights [UDHR] [ICCPR] [ICESCR] have
a role in the development and management of the Internet [UNGA2013]
[NETmundial]. It has also been argued that the Internet should be
strengthened as an enabling environment for human rights [Brown].
This document aims to (1) expose the relationship between protocols
and human rights, (2) propose possible guidelines to protect the
Internet as an enabling environment for human rights in future
protocol development, in a manner similar to the work done for
privacy considerations [RFC6973], and (3) increase the awareness, in
both the human rights community and the technical community, of the
importance of the technical workings of the Internet and its impact
on human rights.
Document authors who want to apply this work to their own can go
directly to Section 6 of this document.
Open, secure, and reliable connectivity is necessary (although not
sufficient) to exercise human rights such as freedom of expression
and freedom of association [FOC], as defined in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR]. The purpose of the Internet is
to be a global network of networks that provides unfettered
connectivity to all users, and for any content [RFC1958]. This
objective of stimulating global connectivity contributes to the
Internet's role as an enabler of human rights. The Internet has
given people a platform to exchange opinions and gather information;
it has enabled people of different backgrounds and genders to
participate in the public debate; it has also allowed people to
congregate and organize. Next to that, the strong commitment to
security [RFC1984] [RFC3365] and privacy [RFC6973] [RFC7258] in the
Internet's architectural design contributes to the strengthening of
the Internet as an enabling environment for human rights. One could
even argue that the Internet is not only an enabler of human rights
but that human rights lie at the base of, and are ingrained in, the
architecture of the networks that make up the Internet. Internet
connectivity increases the capacity for individuals to exercise their
rights; the core of the Internet -- its architectural design -- is
therefore closely intertwined with the human rights framework
[CathFloridi]. The quintessential link between the Internet's
infrastructure and human rights has been argued by many. [Bless1],
for instance, argues that "to a certain extent, the Internet and its
protocols have already facilitated the realization of human rights,
e.g., the freedom of assembly and expression. In contrast, measures
of censorship and pervasive surveillance violate fundamental human
rights." [DeNardis15] argues that "Since the first hints of Internet
commercialization and internationalization, the IETF has supported
strong security in protocol design and has sometimes served as a
force resisting protocol-enabled surveillance features." By doing
so, the IETF enabled the manifestation of the right to privacy,
through the Internet's infrastructure. Additionally, access to
freely available information gives people access to knowledge that
enables them to help satisfy other human rights; as such, the
Internet increasingly becomes a precondition for human rights rather
than a supplement.
Human rights can be in conflict with each other, such as the right to
freedom of expression and the right to privacy. In such cases, the
different affected rights need to be balanced. To do this, it is
crucial that the impacts on rights are clearly documented in order to
mitigate potential harm. This research aims to ultimately contribute
to making that process tangible and practical for protocol
developers. Technology can never be fully equated with a human
right. Whereas a specific technology might be a strong enabler of a
specific human right, it might have an adverse impact on another
human right. In this case, decisions on design and deployment need
to take this into account.
The open nature of the initial technical design and its open
standards, as well as developments like open source, fostered freedom
of communication. What emerged was a network of networks that could
enable everyone to connect and to exchange data, information, and
code. For many, enabling such connections became a core value.
However, as the scale and the commercialization of the Internet grew,
topics like access, rights, and connectivity have been forced to
compete with other values. Therefore, important characteristics of
the Internet that enable human rights might be degraded if they're
not properly defined, described, and protected as such. Conversely,
not protecting characteristics that enable human rights could also
result in (partial) loss of functionality and connectivity, along
with other inherent parts of the Internet's architecture of networks.
New protocols, particularly those that upgrade the core
infrastructure of the network, should be designed to continue to
enable fundamental human rights.
The IETF has produced guidelines and procedures to ensure and
galvanize the privacy of individuals and security of the network in
protocol development. This document aims to explore the possibility
of developing similar procedures for guidelines for human rights
considerations to ensure that protocols developed in the IETF do not
have an adverse impact on the realization of human rights on the
Internet. By carefully considering the answers to the questions
posed in Section 6 of this document, document authors should be
(1) able to produce a comprehensive analysis that can serve as the
basis for discussion on whether the protocol adequately protects
against specific human rights threats and (2) potentially stimulated
to think about alternative design choices.
This document was developed within the framework of the Human Rights
Protocol Considerations (HRPC) Research Group, based on discussions
on the HRPC mailing list (Section 9); this document was also
extensively discussed during HRPC sessions. This document has
received eleven in-depth reviews on the mailing list, and it received
many comments from inside and outside the IRTF and IETF communities.
2. Vocabulary Used
In the discussion of human rights and Internet architecture, concepts
developed in computer science, networking, law, policy-making, and
advocacy are coming together [Dutton] [Kaye] [Franklin] [RFC1958].
The same concepts might have a very different meaning and
implications in other areas of expertise. In order to foster a
constructive interdisciplinary debate and minimize differences in
interpretation, the following glossary is provided. It builds as
much as possible on existing definitions; when definitions were not
available in IETF documents, definitions were taken from other
Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) or academic literature.
Accessibility: "Full Internet Connectivity", as described in
[RFC4084], to provide unfettered access to the Internet.
The design of protocols, services, or implementations that provide
an enabling environment for people with disabilities.
The ability to receive information available on the Internet.
Anonymity: The condition of an identity being unknown or concealed
[RFC4949].
Anonymous: A state of an individual in which an observer or attacker
cannot identify the individual within a set of other individuals
(the anonymity set) [RFC6973].
Authenticity: The property of being genuine and able to be verified
and be trusted [RFC4949].
Blocking: The practice of preventing access to resources in the
aggregate [RFC7754]. Both blocking and filtering can be
implemented at the level of "services" (web hosting or video
streaming, for example) or at the level of particular "content"
[RFC7754].
Censorship: Technical mechanisms, including both blocking and
filtering, that certain political or private actors around the
world use to block or degrade Internet traffic. For further
details on the various elements of Internet censorship, see
[Hall].
Censorship resistance: Methods and measures to mitigate Internet
censorship.
Confidentiality: The property that data is not disclosed to system
entities unless they have been authorized to know the data
[RFC4949].
Connectivity: The extent to which a device or network is able to
reach other devices or networks to exchange data. The Internet is
the tool for providing global connectivity [RFC1958]. Different
types of connectivity are further specified in [RFC4084].
The end-to-end principle, interoperability, distributed
architecture, resilience, reliability, and robustness in
combination constitute the enabling factors that result in
connectivity to, and on, the Internet.
Content agnosticism: Treating network traffic identically regardless
of content.
Decentralized: Implementation or deployment of standards, protocols,
or systems without one single point of control.
End-to-end principle: The principle that application-specific
functions should not be embedded into the network and thus stay at
the endpoints. In many cases, especially when dealing with
failures, the right decisions can only be made with the
corresponding application-specific knowledge, which is available
at endpoints not in the network.
The end-to-end principle is one of the key architectural
guidelines of the Internet. The argument in favor of the
end-to-end approach to system design is laid out in the
fundamental papers by Saltzer, Reed, and Clark [Saltzer] [Clark].
In these papers, the authors argue in favor of radical
simplification: system designers should only build the essential
and shared functions into the network, as most functions can only
be implemented at network endpoints. Building features into the
network for the benefit of certain applications will come at the
expense of others. As such, in general system designers should
attempt to steer clear of building anything into the network that
is not a bare necessity for its functioning. Following the
end-to-end principle is crucial for innovation, as it makes
innovation at the edges possible without having to make changes to
the network, and it protects the robustness of the network.
[RFC2775] further elaborates on various aspects of end-to-end
connectivity.
Federation: The possibility of connecting autonomous and possibly
centralized systems into a single system without a central
authority.
Filtering: The practice of preventing access to specific resources
within an aggregate [RFC7754].
Heterogeneity: "The Internet is characterized by heterogeneity on
many levels: devices and nodes, router scheduling algorithms and
queue management mechanisms, routing protocols, levels of
multiplexing, protocol versions and implementations, underlying
link layers (e.g., point-to-point, multi-access links, wireless,
FDDI, etc.), in the traffic mix and in the levels of congestion at
different times and places. Moreover, as the Internet is composed
of autonomous organizations and internet service providers, each
with their own separate policy concerns, there is a large
heterogeneity of administrative domains and pricing structures."
[FIArch]
As a result, per [FIArch], the heterogeneity principle proposed in
[RFC1958] needs to be supported by design.
Human rights: Principles and norms that are indivisible,
interrelated, unalienable, universal, and mutually reinforcing.
Human rights have been codified in national and international
bodies of law. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR]
is the most well-known document in the history of human rights.
The aspirations from [UDHR] were later codified into treaties such
as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
[ICCPR] and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights [ICESCR], after which signatory countries were
obliged to reflect them in their national bodies of law. There is
also a broad recognition that not only states have obligations
vis-a-vis human rights, but non-state actors do as well.
Integrity: The property that data has not been changed, destroyed,
or lost in an unauthorized or accidental manner [RFC4949].
Internationalization (i18n): The practice of making protocols,
standards, and implementations usable in different languages and
scripts (see Section 6.2.12 ("Localization")).
"In the IETF, 'internationalization' means to add or improve the
handling of non-ASCII text in a protocol" [RFC6365].
A different perspective, more appropriate to protocols that are
designed for global use from the beginning, is the definition used
by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [W3Ci18nDef]:
"Internationalization is the design and development of a product,
application or document content that enables easy localization for
target audiences that vary in culture, region, or language."
Many protocols that handle text only handle one charset
(US-ASCII), or they leave the question of encoding up to local
guesswork (which leads, of course, to interoperability problems)
[RFC3536]. If multiple charsets are permitted, they must be
explicitly identified [RFC2277]. Adding non-ASCII text to a
protocol allows the protocol to handle more scripts, hopefully all
scripts in use in the world. In today's world, that is normally
best accomplished by allowing Unicode encoded in UTF-8 only,
thereby shifting conversion issues away from ad hoc choices.
Interoperable: A property of a documented standard or protocol that
allows different independent implementations to work with each
other without any restriction on functionality.
Localization (l10n): The practice of translating an implementation
to make it functional in a specific language or for users in a
specific locale (see Section 6.2.5 ("Internationalization")).
(cf. [RFC6365]): The process of adapting an internationalized
application platform or application to a specific cultural
environment. In localization, the same semantics are preserved
while the syntax may be changed [FRAMEWORK].
Localization is the act of tailoring an application for a
different language, script, or culture. Some internationalized
applications can handle a wide variety of languages. Typical
users only understand a small number of languages, so the program
must be tailored to interact with users in just the languages they
know. The major work of localization is translating the user
interface and documentation. Localization involves not only
changing the language interaction but also other relevant changes,
such as display of numbers, dates, currency, and so on. The
better internationalized an application is, the easier it is to
localize it for a particular language and character-encoding
scheme.
Open standards: Conform with [RFC2026], which states the following:
"Various national and international standards bodies, such as
ANSI, ISO, IEEE, and ITU-T, develop a variety of protocol and
service specifications that are similar to Technical
Specifications defined here. National and international groups
also publish 'implementors' agreements' that are analogous to
Applicability Statements, capturing a body of implementation-
specific detail concerned with the practical application of their
standards. All of these are considered to be 'open external
standards' for the purposes of the Internet Standards Process."
Openness: Absence of centralized points of control -- "a feature
that is assumed to make it easy for new users to join and new uses
to unfold" [Brown].
Permissionless innovation: The freedom and ability to freely create
and deploy new protocols on top of the communications constructs
that currently exist.
Privacy: The right of an entity (normally a person), acting on its
own behalf, to determine the degree to which it will interact with
its environment, including the degree to which the entity is
willing to share its personal information with others [RFC4949].
The right of individuals to control or influence what information
related to them may be collected and stored, and by whom and to
whom that information may be disclosed.
Privacy is a broad concept relating to the protection of
individual or group autonomy and the relationship between an
individual or group and society, including government, companies,
and private individuals. It is often summarized as "the right to
be left alone", but it encompasses a wide range of rights,
including protections from intrusions into family and home life,
control of sexual and reproductive rights, and communications
secrecy. It is commonly recognized as a core right that underpins
human dignity and other values such as freedom of association and
freedom of speech.
The right to privacy is also recognized in nearly every national
constitution and in most international human rights treaties. It
has been adjudicated upon by both international and regional
bodies. The right to privacy is also legally protected at the
national level through provisions in civil and/or criminal codes.
Reliability: Ensures that a protocol will execute its function
consistently as described and function without unexpected results.
A system that is reliable degenerates gracefully and will have a
documented way to announce degradation. It also has mechanisms to
recover from failure gracefully and, if applicable, allow for
partial healing [dict].
Resilience: The maintaining of dependability and performance in the
face of unanticipated changes and circumstances [Meyer].
Robustness: The resistance of protocols and their implementations to
errors, and resistance to involuntary, legal, or malicious
attempts to disrupt their modes of operation [RFC760] [RFC791]
[RFC793] [RFC1122]. Or, framed more positively, a system can
provide functionality consistently and without errors despite
involuntary, legal, or malicious attempts to disrupt its mode of
operation.
Scalability: The ability to handle increased or decreased system
parameters (number of end systems, users, data flows, routing
entries, etc.) predictably within defined expectations. There
should be a clear definition of its scope and applicability. The
limits of a system's scalability should be defined. Growth or
shrinkage of these parameters is typically considered by orders of
magnitude.
Strong encryption / cryptography: Used to describe a cryptographic
algorithm that would require a large amount of computational power
to defeat it [RFC4949]. In the modern usage of the definition of
"strong encryption", this refers to an amount of computing power
currently not available, not even to major state-level actors.
Transparency: In this context, linked to the comprehensibility of a
protocol in relation to the choices it makes for users, protocol
developers, and implementers, and to its outcome.
Outcome transparency is linked to the comprehensibility of the
effects of a protocol in relation to the choices it makes for
users, protocol developers, and implementers, including the
comprehensibility of possible unintended consequences of protocol
choices (e.g., lack of authenticity may lead to lack of integrity
and negative externalities).
3. Research Questions
The Human Rights Protocol Considerations (HRPC) Research Group in the
Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) embarked on its mission to answer
the following two questions, which are also the main two questions
that this document seeks to answer:
1. How can Internet protocols and standards impact human rights, by
either enabling them or creating a restrictive environment?
2. Can guidelines be developed to improve informed and transparent
decision-making about the potential impact of protocols on human
rights?
4. Literature and Discussion Review
Protocols and standards are regularly seen as merely performing
technical functions. However, these protocols and standards do not
exist outside of their technical context, nor do they exist outside
of their political, historical, economic, legal, or cultural context.
This is best exemplified by the way in which some Internet processes
and protocols have become part and parcel of political processes and
public policies: one only has to look at the IANA transition,
[RFC7258] ("Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack"), or global innovation
policy, for concrete examples [DeNardis15]. According to [Abbate],
"protocols are politics by other means." This statement would
probably not garner IETF consensus, but it nonetheless reveals that
protocols are based on decision-making, most often by humans. In
this process, the values and ideas about the role that a particular
technology should perform in society are embedded into the design.
Often, these design decisions are partly "purely technical" and
partly inspired by a certain world view of how technology should
function that is inspired by personal, corporate, and political
views. Within the community of IETF participants, there is a strong
desire to solve technical problems and to minimize engagement with
political processes and non-protocol-related political issues.
Since the late 1990s, a burgeoning group of academics and
practitioners researched questions surrounding the societal impact of
protocols, as well as the politics of protocols. These studies vary
in focus and scope: some focus on specific standards [Davidson-etal]
[Musiani]; others look into the political, legal, commercial, or
social impact of protocols [BrownMarsden] [Lessig] [Mueller]; and yet
others look at how the engineers' personal set of values get
translated into technology [Abbate] [CathFloridi] [DeNardis15]
[WynsbergheMoura].
Commercial and political influences on the management of the
Internet's infrastructure are well documented in the academic
literature and will thus not be discussed here; see [Benkler],
[Brown-etal], [DeNardis15], [Lessig], [Mueller], and [Zittrain]. It
is sufficient to say that the IETF community consistently tries to
push back against the standardization of surveillance and certain
other issues that negatively influence an end user's experience of,
and trust in, the Internet [DeNardis14]. The role that human rights
play in engineering, infrastructure maintenance, and protocol design
is much less clear.
It is very important to understand how protocols and standards impact
human rights, in particular because SDOs are increasingly becoming
venues where social values (like human rights) are discussed,
although often from a technological point of view. These SDOs are
becoming a new focal point for discussions about "values by design"
and the role of technical engineers in protecting or enabling human
rights [Brown-etal] [Clark-etal] [DeNardis14] [CathFloridi] [Lessig]
[Rachovitsa].
In the academic literature, five clear positions can be discerned in
relation to the role of human rights in protocol design and how to
account for these human rights in protocol development: Clark
et al. [Clark-etal] argue that there is a need to design "for
variation in outcome -- so that the outcome can be different in
different places, and the tussle takes place within the design (...)"
[as] "Rigid designs will be broken; designs that permit variation
will flex under pressure and survive." They hold that human rights
should not be hard-coded into protocols for three reasons: First, the
rights in the UDHR are not absolute. Second, technology is not the
only tool in the tussle over human rights. And last but not least,
it is dangerous to make promises that can't be kept. The open nature
of the Internet will never, they argue, be enough to fully protect
individuals' human rights.
Conversely, Brown et al. [Brown-etal] state that "some key, universal
values -- of which the UDHR is the most legitimate expression --
should be baked into the architecture at design time." They argue
that design choices have offline consequences and are able to shape
the power positions of groups or individuals in society. As such,
the individuals making these technical decisions have a moral
obligation to take into account the impact of their decisions on
society and, by extension, human rights. Brown et al. recognize that
values and the implementation of human rights vary across the globe.
Yet they argue that all members of the United Nations have found
"common agreement on the values proclaimed in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. In looking for the most legitimate set
of global values to embed in the future Internet architectures, the
UDHR has the democratic assent of a significant fraction of the
planet's population, through their elected representatives."
The main disagreement between these two academic positions lies
mostly in the question of whether (1) a particular value system
should be embedded into the Internet's architectures or (2) the
architectures need to account for a varying set of values.
A third position, which is similar to that of Brown et al., is taken
by [Broeders], in which Broeders argues that "we must find ways to
continue guaranteeing the overall integrity and functionality of the
public core of the Internet." He argues that the best way to do this
is by declaring the backbone of the Internet -- which includes the
TCP/IP protocol suite, numerous standards, the Domain Name System
(DNS), and routing protocols -- a common public good. This is a
different approach than those of [Clark-etal] and [Brown-etal]
because Broeders does not suggest that social values should (or
should not) be explicitly coded into the Internet, but rather that
the existing infrastructure should be seen as an entity of public
value.
Bless and Orwat [Bless2] represent a fourth position. They argue
that it is too early to make any definitive claims but that there is
a need for more careful analysis of the impact of protocol design
choices on human rights. They also argue that it is important to
search for solutions that "create awareness in the technical
community about impact of design choices on social values" and "work
towards a methodology for co-design of technical and institutional
systems."
Berners-Lee and Halpin [BernersLeeHalpin] represent a fifth position.
They argue that the Internet could lead to even newer capacities, and
these capacities may over time be viewed as new kinds of rights. For
example, Internet access may be viewed as a human right in and of
itself if it is taken to be a precondition for other rights, even if
it could not have been predicted at the time that the UDHR was
written (after the end of World War II).
It is important to contextualize the technical discussion with the
academic discussions on this issue. The academic discussions are
also important to document, as they inform the position of the
authors of this document. The research group's position is that
hard-coding human rights into protocols is complicated and changes
with the context. At this point, it is difficult to say whether or
not hard-coding human rights into protocols is wise or feasible.
Additionally, there are many human rights, but not all are relevant
for information and communications technologies (ICTs). A partial
catalog (with references to sources) of human rights related to ICTs
can be found in [Hill2014]. It is, however, important to make
conscious and explicit design decisions that take into account the
human rights protocol considerations guidelines developed below.
This will contribute to the understanding of the impact that
protocols can have on human rights, for both developers and users.
In addition, it contributes to (1) the careful consideration of the
impact that a specific protocol might have on human rights and
(2) the dissemination of the practice of documenting protocol design
decisions related to human rights.
Pursuant to the principle of constant change, because the function
and scope of the Internet evolve, so does the role of the IETF in
developing standards. Internet Standards are adopted based on a
series of criteria, including high technical quality, support by
community consensus, and their overall benefit to the Internet. The
latter calls for an assessment of the interests of all affected
parties and the specifications' impact on the Internet's users. In
this respect, the effective exercise of the human rights of the
Internet users is a relevant consideration that needs to be
appreciated in the standardization process insofar as it is directly
linked to the reliability and core values of the Internet [RFC1958]
[RFC2775] [RFC3439] [RFC3724].
This document details the steps taken in the research into human
rights protocol considerations by the HRPC Research Group to clarify
the relationship between technical concepts used in the IETF and
human rights. This document sets out some preliminary steps and
considerations for engineers to take into account when developing
standards and protocols.
5. Methodology
Mapping the relationship between human rights, protocols, and
architectures is a new research challenge that requires a good amount
of interdisciplinary and cross-organizational cooperation to develop
a consistent methodology.
The methodological choices made in this document are based on the
political-science-based method of discourse analysis and ethnographic
research methods [Cath]. This work departs from the assumption that
language reflects the understanding of concepts. Or, as [Jabri]
holds, policy documents are "social relations represented in texts
where the language contained within these texts is used to construct
meaning and representation." This process happens in society
[Denzin] and manifests itself in institutions and organizations
[King], exposed using the ethnographic methods of semi-structured
interviews and participant observation. Or, in non-academic
language, the way the language in IETF/IRTF documents describes and
approaches the issues they are trying to address is an indication of
the underlying social assumptions and relationships of the engineers
to their engineering. By reading and analyzing these documents, as
well as interviewing engineers and participating in the IETF/IRTF
working groups, it is possible to distill the relationship between
human rights, protocols, and the Internet's infrastructure as it
pertains to the work of the IETF.
The discourse analysis was operationalized using qualitative and
quantitative means. The first step taken by the authors and
contributors was reading RFCs and other official IETF documents. The
second step was the use of a Python-based analyzer, using the
"Bigbang" tool, adapted by Nick Doty [Doty], to scan for the concepts
that were identified as important architectural principles (distilled
on the initial reading and supplemented by the interviews and
participant observation). Such a quantitative method is very precise
and speeds up the research process [Ritchie]. But this tool is
unable to understand "latent meaning" [Denzin]. In order to mitigate
these issues of automated word-frequency-based approaches and to get
a sense of the "thick meaning" [Geertz] of the data, a second
qualitative analysis of the data set was performed. These various
rounds of discourse analysis were used to inform the interviews and
further data analysis. As such, the initial rounds of quantitative
discourse analysis were used to inform the second rounds of
qualitative analysis. The results from the qualitative interviews
were again used to feed new concepts into the quantitative discourse
analysis. As such, the two methods continued to support and enrich
each other.
The ethnographic methods of the data collection and processing
allowed the research group to acquire the data necessary to "provide
a holistic understanding of research participants' views and actions"
[Denzin] that highlighted ongoing issues and case studies where
protocols impact human rights. The interview participants were
selected through purposive sampling [Babbie], as the research group
was interested in getting a wide variety of opinions on the role of
human rights in guiding protocol development. This sampling method
also ensured that individuals with extensive experience working at
the IETF in various roles were targeted. The interviewees included
individuals in leadership positions (Working Group (WG) chairs, Area
Directors (ADs)), "regular participants", and individuals working for
specific entities (corporate, civil society, political, academic) and
represented various backgrounds, nationalities, and genders.
5.1. Data Sources
In order to map the potential relationship between human rights and
protocols, the HRPC Research Group gathered data from three specific
sources:
5.1.1. Discourse Analysis of RFCs
To start addressing the issue, a mapping exercise analyzing Internet
infrastructure and protocol features vis-a-vis their possible impact
on human rights was undertaken. Therefore, research on (1) the
language used in current and historic RFCs and (2) information
gathered from mailing-list discussions was undertaken to expose core
architectural principles, language, and deliberations on the human
rights of those affected by the network.
5.1.2. Interviews with Members of the IETF Community
Over 30 interviews with the current and past members of the Internet
Architecture Board (IAB), current and past members of the Internet
Engineering Steering Group (IESG), chairs of selected working groups,
and RFC authors were done at the IETF 92 meeting in Dallas in
March 2015 to get an insider's understanding of how they view the
relationship (if any) between human rights and protocols, and how
this relationship plays out in their work. Several of the
participants opted to remain anonymous. If you are interested in
this data set, please contact the authors of this document.
5.1.3. Participant Observation in Working Groups
By participating in various working groups, in person at IETF
meetings, and on mailing lists, information about the IETF's
day-to-day workings was gathered, from which general themes,
technical concepts, and use cases about human rights and protocols
were extracted. This process started at the IETF 91 meeting in
Honolulu and continues today.
5.2. Data Analysis Strategies
The data above was processed using three consecutive strategies:
mapping protocols related to human rights, extracting concepts from
these protocols, and creation of a common glossary (detailed under
Section 2). Before going over these strategies, some elaboration on
the process of identifying technical concepts as they relate to human
rights is needed:
5.2.1. Identifying Qualities of Technical Concepts That Relate to Human
Rights
5.2.1.1. Mapping Protocols and Standards to Human Rights
By combining data from the three data sources named above, an
extensive list of protocols and standards that potentially enable the
Internet as a tool for freedom of expression and association was
created. In order to determine the enabling (or inhibiting)
features, we relied on direct references in the RFCs as related to
such impacts, as well as input from the community. Based on this
analysis, a list of RFCs that describe standards and protocols that
are potentially closely related to human rights was compiled.
5.2.1.2. Extracting Concepts from Selected RFCs
The first step was to identify the protocols and standards that are
related to human rights and to create an environment that enables
human rights. For that, we needed to focus on specific technical
concepts that underlie these protocols and standards. Based on this
list, a number of technical concepts that appeared frequently were
extracted and used to create a second list of technical terms that,
when combined and applied in different circumstances, create an
enabling environment for exercising human rights on the Internet.
5.2.1.3. Building a Common Vocabulary of Technical Concepts That Impact
Human Rights
While interviewing experts, investigating RFCs, and compiling
technical definitions, several concepts of convergence and divergence
were identified. To ensure that the discussion was based on a common
understanding of terms and vocabulary, a list of definitions was
created. The definitions are based on the wording found in various
IETF documents; if the definitions were not available therein,
definitions were taken from other SDOs or academic literature, as
indicated in Section 2.
5.2.1.4. Translating Human Rights Concepts into Technical Definitions
The previous steps allowed for the clarification of relationships
between human rights and technical concepts. The steps taken show
how the research process "zoomed in", from compiling a broad list of
protocols and standards that relate to human rights to extracting the
precise technical concepts that make up these protocols and
standards, in order to understand the relationship between the two.
This subsection presents the next step: translating human rights to
technical concepts by matching the individual components of the
rights to the accompanying technical concepts, allowing for the
creation of a list of technical concepts that, when partially
combined, can create an enabling environment for human rights.
5.2.1.5. List of Technical Terms That, When Partially Combined, Can
Create an Enabling Environment for Human Rights
Based on the prior steps, the following list of technical terms was
drafted. When partially combined, this list can create an enabling
environment for human rights, such as freedom of expression and
freedom of association.
Architectural principles Enabling features
and system properties for user rights
/------------------------------------------------\
| |
+=================|=============================+ |
= | = |
= | End-to-end = |
= | Reliability = |
= | Resilience = Access as |
= | Interoperability = human right |
= Good enough | Transparency = |
= principle | Data minimization = |
= | Permissionless innovation = |
= Simplicity | Graceful degradation = |
= | Connectivity = |
= | Heterogeneity support = |
= | = |
= | = |
= \------------------------------------------------/
= =
+===============================================+
Figure 1: Relationship between Architectural Principles and Enabling
Features for User Rights
5.2.2. Relating Human Rights to Technical Concepts
The technical concepts listed in the steps above have been grouped
according to their impact on specific rights, as mentioned in the
interviews done at IETF 92 as well as the study of literature (see
Section 4 ("Literature and Discussion Review") above).
This analysis aims to assist protocol developers in better
understanding the roles that specific technical concepts have with
regard to their contribution to an enabling environment for people to
exercise their human rights.
This analysis does not claim to be a complete or exhaustive mapping
of all possible ways in which protocols could potentially impact
human rights, but it presents a mapping of initial concepts based on
interviews and on discussion and review of the literature.
+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------+
| Technical Concepts | Rights Potentially Impacted |
+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------+
| Connectivity | |
| Privacy | |
| Security | |
| Content agnosticism | Right to freedom of expression |
| Internationalization | |
| Censorship resistance | |
| Open standards | |
| Heterogeneity support | |
+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------+
| Anonymity | |
| Privacy | |
| Pseudonymity | Right to non-discrimination |
| Accessibility | |
+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------+
| Content agnosticism | |
| Security | Right to equal protection |
+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------+
| Accessibility | |
| Internationalization | Right to political participation |
| Censorship resistance | |
| Connectivity | |
+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------+
| Open standards | |
| Localization | Right to participate in cultural life, |
| Internationalization | arts, and science, and |
| Censorship resistance | Right to education |
| Accessibility | |
+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------+
| Connectivity | |
| Decentralization | |
| Censorship resistance | Right to freedom of assembly |
| Pseudonymity | and association |
| Anonymity | |
| Security | |
+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------+
| Reliability | |
| Confidentiality | |
| Integrity | Right to security |
| Authenticity | |
| Anonymity | |
| | |
+-----------------------+-----------------------------------------+
Figure 2: Relationship between Specific Technical Concepts
with Regard to Their Contribution to an Enabling Environment
for People to Exercise Their Human Rights
5.2.3. Mapping Cases of Protocols, Implementations, and Networking
Paradigms That Adversely Impact Human Rights or Are Enablers
Thereof
Given the information above, the following list of cases of
protocols, implementations, and networking paradigms that either
adversely impact or enable human rights was formed.
It is important to note that the assessment here is not a general
judgment on these protocols, nor is it an exhaustive listing of all
the potential negative or positive impacts on human rights that these
protocols might have. When these protocols were conceived, there
were many criteria to take into account. For instance, relying on a
centralized service can be bad for freedom of speech (it creates one
more control point, where censorship could be applied), but it may be
a necessity if the endpoints are not connected and reachable
permanently. So, when we say "protocol X has feature Y, which may
endanger freedom of speech," it does not mean that protocol X is bad,
much less that its authors were evil. The goal here is to show, with
actual examples, that the design of protocols has practical
consequences for some human rights and that these consequences have
to be considered in the design phase.
5.2.3.1. IPv4
The Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), also known as "Layer 3" of
the Internet and specified with a common encapsulation and protocol
header, is defined in [RFC791]. The evolution of Internet
communications led to continued development in this area,
"encapsulated" in the development of version 6 (IPv6) of the protocol
[RFC8200]. In spite of this updated protocol, we find that 23 years
after the specification of IPv6 the older IPv4 standard continues to
account for a sizable majority of Internet traffic. Most of the
issues discussed here (Network Address Translators (NATs) are a major
exception; see Section 5.2.3.1.2 ("Address Translation and
Mobility")) are valid for IPv4 as well as IPv6.
The Internet was designed as a platform for free and open
communication, most notably encoded in the end-to-end principle, and
that philosophy is also present in the technical implementation of IP
[RFC3724]. While the protocol was designed to exist in an
environment where intelligence is at the end hosts, it has proven to
provide sufficient information that a more intelligent network core
can make policy decisions and enforce policy-based traffic shaping,
thereby restricting the communications of end hosts. These
capabilities for network control and for limitations on freedom of
expression by end hosts can be traced back to the design of IPv4,
helping us to understand which technical protocol decisions have led
to harm to this human right. A feature that can harm freedom of
expression as well as the right to privacy through misuse of IP is
the exploitation of the public visibility of the host pairs for all
communications and the corresponding ability to differentiate and
block traffic as a result of that metadata.
5.2.3.1.1. Network Visibility of Source and Destination
The IPv4 protocol header contains fixed location fields for both the
source IP address and destination IP address [RFC791]. These
addresses identify both the host sending and the host receiving each
message; they also allow the core network to understand who is
talking to whom and to practically limit communication selectively
between pairs of hosts. Blocking of communication based on the pair
of source and destination is one of the most common limitations on
the ability for people to communicate today [CAIDA] and can be seen
as a restriction of the ability for people to assemble or to
consensually express themselves.
Inclusion of an Internet-wide identified source in the IP header
is not the only possible design, especially since the protocol is
most commonly implemented over Ethernet networks exposing only
link-local identifiers [RFC894].
A variety of alternative designs do exist, such as the Accountable
and Private Internet Protocol [APIP] and High-speed Onion Routing at
the Network Layer (HORNET) [HORNET] as well as source routing. The
latter would allow the sender to choose a predefined (safe) route and
spoofing of the source IP address, which are technically supported by
IPv4, but neither are considered good practice on the Internet
[Farrow]. While projects like [TorProject] provide an alternative
implementation of anonymity in connections, they have been developed
in spite of the IPv4 protocol design.
5.2.3.1.2. Address Translation and Mobility
A major structural shift in the Internet that undermined the protocol
design of IPv4, and significantly reduced the freedom of end users to
communicate and assemble, was the introduction of network address
translation [RFC3022]. Network address translation is a process
whereby organizations and autonomous systems connect two networks by
translating the IPv4 source and destination addresses between them.
This process puts the router performing the translation in a
privileged position, where it is predetermined which subset of
communications will be translated.
This process of translation has widespread adoption despite promoting
a process that goes against the stated end-to-end process of the
underlying protocol [NATusage]. In contrast, the proposed mechanism
to provide support for mobility and forwarding to clients that may
move -- encoded instead as an option in IP [RFC5944] -- has failed to
gain traction. In this situation, the compromise made in the design
of the protocol resulted in a technology that is not coherent with
the end-to-end principles and thus creates an extra possible hurdle
for freedom of expression in its design, even though a viable
alternative exists. There is a particular problem surrounding NATs
and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) (as well as other connections
used for privacy purposes), as NATs sometimes cause VPNs not to work.
5.2.3.2. DNS
The Domain Name System (DNS) [RFC1035] provides service discovery
capabilities and provides a mechanism to associate human-readable
names with services. The DNS is organized around a set of
independently operated "root servers" run by organizations that
function in line with ICANN's policy by answering queries for which
organizations have been delegated to manage registration under each
Top-Level Domain (TLD). The DNS is organized as a rooted tree, and
this brings up political and social concerns over control. TLDs are
maintained and determined by ICANN. These namespaces encompass
several classes of services. The initial namespaces, including
".com" and ".net", provide common spaces for expression of ideas,
though their policies are enacted through US-based companies. Other
namespaces are delegated to specific nationalities and may impose
limits designed to focus speech in those forums, to both (1) promote
speech from that nationality and (2) comply with local limits on
expression and social norms. Finally, the system has recently been
expanded with additional generic and sponsored namespaces -- for
instance, ".travel" and ".ninja" -- that are operated by a range of
organizations that may independently determine their registration
policies. This new development has both positive and negative
implications in terms of enabling human rights. Some individuals
argue that it undermines the right to freedom of expression because
some of these new generic TLDs have restricted policies on
registration and particular rules on hate speech content. Others
argue that precisely these properties are positive because they
enable certain (mostly minority) communities to build safer spaces
for association, thereby enabling their right to freedom of
association. An often-mentioned example is an application like
.gay [CoE].
As discussed in [RFC7626], DNS has significant privacy issues. Most
notable is the lack of encryption to limit the visibility of requests
for domain resolution from intermediary parties, and a limited
deployment of DNSSEC to provide authentication, allowing the client
to know that they received a correct, "authoritative" answer to a
query. In response to the privacy issues, the IETF DNS Private
Exchange (DPRIVE) Working Group is developing mechanisms to provide
confidentiality to DNS transactions, to address concerns surrounding
pervasive monitoring [RFC7258].
Authentication through DNSSEC creates a validation path for records.
This authentication protects against forged or manipulated DNS data.
As such, DNSSEC protects directory lookups and makes it harder to
hijack a session. This is important because interference with the
operation of the DNS is currently becoming one of the central
mechanisms used to block access to websites. This interference
limits both the freedom of expression of the publisher to offer their
content and the freedom of assembly for clients to congregate in a
shared virtual space. Even though DNSSEC doesn't prevent censorship,
it makes it clear that the returned information is not the
information that was requested; this contributes to the right to
security and increases trust in the network. It is, however,
important to note that DNSSEC is currently not widely supported or
deployed by domain name registrars, making it difficult to
authenticate and use correctly.
5.2.3.2.1. Removal of Records
There have been a number of cases where the records for a domain are
removed from the name system due to political events. Examples of
this removal include the "seizure" of wikileaks [BBC-wikileaks] and
the names of illegally operating gambling operations by the United
States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unit. In the first
case, a US court ordered the registrar to take down the domain. In
the second, ICE compelled the US-based registry in charge of the .com
TLD to hand ownership of those domains over to the US government.
The same technique has been used in Libya to remove sites in
violation of "our Country's Law and Morality (which) do not allow any
kind of pornography or its promotion." [techyum]
At a protocol level, there is no technical auditing for name
ownership, as in alternate systems like Namecoin [Namecoin]. As a
result, there is no ability for users to differentiate seizure from
the legitimate transfer of name ownership, which is purely a policy
decision made by registrars. While DNSSEC addresses the network
distortion events described below, it does not tackle this problem.
(Although we mention alternative techniques, this is not a comparison
of DNS with Namecoin: the latter has its own problems and
limitations. The idea here is to show that there are several
possible choices, and they have consequences for human rights.)
5.2.3.2.2. Distortion of Records
The most common mechanism by which the DNS is abused to limit freedom
of expression is through manipulation of protocol messages by the
network. One form occurs at an organizational level, where client
computers are instructed to use a local DNS resolver controlled by
the organization. The DNS resolver will then selectively distort
responses rather than request the authoritative lookup from the
upstream system. The second form occurs through the use of Deep
Packet Inspection (DPI), where all DNS protocol messages are
inspected by the network and objectionable content is distorted, as
can be observed in Chinese networks.
A notable instance of distortion occurred in Greece [Ververis], where
a study found evidence of both (1) DPI to distort DNS replies and
(2) more excessive blocking of content than was legally required or
requested (also known as "overblocking"). Internet Service Providers
(ISPs), obeying a governmental order, prevented clients from
resolving the names of domains, thereby prompting this particular
blocking of systems there.
At a protocol level, the effectiveness of these attacks is made
possible by a lack of authentication in the DNS protocol. DNSSEC
provides the ability to determine the authenticity of responses when
used, but it is not regularly checked by resolvers. DNSSEC is not
effective when the local resolver for a network is complicit in the
distortion -- for instance, when the resolver assigned for use by an
ISP is the source of injection. Selective distortion of records is
also made possible by the predictable structure of DNS messages,
which makes it computationally easy for a network device to watch all
passing messages even at high speeds, and the lack of encryption,
which allows the network to distort only an objectionable subset of
protocol messages. Specific distortion mechanisms are discussed
further in [Hall].
Users can switch to another resolver -- for instance, a public
resolver. The distorter can then try to block or hijack the
connection to this resolver. This may start an arms race, with the
user switching to secured connections to this alternative resolver
[RFC7858] and the distorter then trying to find more sophisticated
ways to block or hijack the connection. In some cases, this search
for an alternative, non-disrupting resolver may lead to more
centralization because many people are switching to a few big
commercial public resolvers.
5.2.3.2.3. Injection of Records
Responding incorrectly to requests for name lookups is the most
common mechanism that in-network devices use to limit the ability of
end users to discover services. A deviation that accomplishes a
similar objective and may be seen as different from a "freedom of
expression" perspective is the injection of incorrect responses to
queries. The most prominent example of this behavior occurs in
China, where requests for lookups of sites deemed inappropriate will
trigger the network to return a false response, causing the client to
ignore the real response when it subsequently arrives
[greatfirewall]. Unlike the other network paradigms discussed above,
injection does not stifle the ability of a server to announce its
name; it instead provides another voice that answers sooner. This is
effective because without DNSSEC, the protocol will respond to
whichever answer is received first, without listening for subsequent
answers.
5.2.3.3. HTTP
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) version 1.1 [RFC7230]
[RFC7231] [RFC7232] [RFC7233] [RFC7234] [RFC7235] [RFC7236] [RFC7237]
is a request-response application protocol developed throughout the
1990s. HTTP factually contributed to the exponential growth of the
Internet and the interconnection of populations around the world.
Its simple design strongly contributed to the fact that HTTP has
become the foundation of most modern Internet platforms and
communication systems, from websites to chat systems and computer-to-
computer applications. In its manifestation in the World Wide Web,
HTTP radically revolutionized the course of technological development
and the ways people interact with online content and with each other.
However, HTTP is also a fundamentally insecure protocol that doesn't
natively provide encryption properties. While the definition of the
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) [RFC6101], and later of Transport Layer
Security (TLS) [RFC5246], also happened during the 1990s, the fact
that HTTP doesn't mandate the use of such encryption layers by
developers and service providers was one of the reasons for a very
late adoption of encryption. Only in the middle of the 2000s did we
observe big ISPs, such as Google, starting to provide encrypted
access to their web services.
The lack of sensitivity and understanding of the critical importance
of securing web traffic incentivized certain (offensive) actors to
develop, deploy, and utilize interception systems at large and to
later launch active injection attacks, in order to swipe large
amounts of data and compromise Internet-enabled devices. The
commercial availability of systems and tools to perform these types
of attacks also led to a number of human rights abuses that have been
discovered and reported over the years.
Generally, we can identify traffic interception (Section 5.2.3.3.1)
and traffic manipulation (Section 5.2.3.3.2) as the two most
problematic attacks that can be performed against applications
employing a cleartext HTTP transport layer. That being said, the
IETF is taking steady steps to move to the encrypted version of HTTP,
HTTP Secure (HTTPS).
While this is commendable, we must not lose track of the fact that
different protocols, implementations, configurations, and networking
paradigms can intersect such that they (can be used to) adversely
impact human rights. For instance, to facilitate surveillance,
certain countries will throttle HTTPS connections, forcing users to
switch to (unthrottled) HTTP [Aryan-etal].
5.2.3.3.1. Traffic Interception
While we are seeing an increasing trend in the last couple of years
to employ SSL/TLS as a secure traffic layer for HTTP-based
applications, we are still far from seeing a ubiquitous use of
encryption on the World Wide Web. It is important to consider that
the adoption of SSL/TLS is also a relatively recent phenomenon.
Email providers such as riseup.net were the first to enable SSL by
default. Google did not introduce an option for its Gmail users to
navigate with SSL until 2008 [Rideout] and turned TLS on by default
later, in 2010 [Schillace]. It took an increasing amount of security
breaches and revelations on global surveillance from Edward Snowden
before other mail service providers followed suit. For example,
Yahoo did not enable SSL/TLS by default on its webmail services until
early 2014 [Peterson].
TLS itself has been subject to many attacks and bugs; this situation
can be attributed to some fundamental design weaknesses, such as lack
of a state machine (which opens a vulnerability for triple handshake
attacks) and flaws caused by early US government restrictions on
cryptography, leading to cipher-suite downgrade attacks (Logjam
attacks). These vulnerabilities are being corrected in TLS 1.3
[Bhargavan] [Adrian].
HTTP upgrading to HTTPS is also vulnerable to having an attacker
remove the "s" in any links to HTTPS URIs from a web page transferred
in cleartext over HTTP -- an attack called "SSL Stripping"
[sslstrip]. Thus, for high-security use of HTTPS, IETF standards
such as HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) [RFC6797], certificate
pinning [RFC7469], and/or DNS-Based Authentication of Named Entities
(DANE) [RFC6698] should be used.
As we learned through Snowden's revelations, intelligence agencies
have been intercepting and collecting unencrypted traffic at large
for many years. There are documented examples of such
mass-surveillance programs with the Government Communications
Headquarters's (GCHQ's) Tempora [WP-Tempora] and the National
Security Agency's (NSA's) XKeyscore [Greenwald]. Through these
programs, the NSA and the GCHQ have been able to swipe large amounts
of data, including email and instant messaging communications that
have been transported in the clear for years by providers
unsuspecting of the pervasiveness and scale of governments' efforts
and investment in global mass-surveillance capabilities.
However, similar mass interception of unencrypted HTTP communications
is also often employed at the national level by some democratic
countries, by exercising control over state-owned ISPs and through
the use of commercially available monitoring, collection, and
censorship equipment. Over the last few years, a lot of information
has come to public attention on the role and scale of a surveillance
industry dedicated to developing different types of interception
gear, making use of known and unknown weaknesses in existing
protocols [RFC7258]. We have several records of such equipment being
sold and utilized by some regimes in order to monitor entire segments
of a population, especially at times of social and political
distress, uncovering massive human rights abuses. For example, in
2013, the group Telecomix revealed that the Syrian regime was making
use of Blue Coat products in order to intercept cleartext traffic as
well as to enforce censorship of unwanted content [RSF]. Similarly,
in 2011, it was found that the French technology firm Amesys provided
the Gadhafi government with equipment able to intercept emails,
Facebook traffic, and chat messages at a country-wide level [WSJ].
The use of such systems, especially in the context of the Arab Spring
and of civil uprisings against the dictatorships, has caused serious
concerns regarding significant human rights abuses in Libya.
5.2.3.3.2. Traffic Manipulation
The lack of a secure transport layer under HTTP connections not only
exposes users to interception of the content of their communications
but is more and more commonly abused as a vehicle for actively
compromising computers and mobile devices. If an HTTP session
travels in the clear over the network, any node positioned at any
point in the network is able to perform man-in-the-middle attacks;
the node can observe, manipulate, and hijack the session and can
modify the content of the communication in order to trigger
unexpected behavior by the application generating the traffic. For
example, in the case of a browser, the attacker would be able to
inject malicious code in order to exploit vulnerabilities in the
browser or any of its plugins. Similarly, the attacker would be able
to intercept, add malware to, and repackage binary software updates
that are very commonly downloaded in the clear by applications such
as word processors and media players. If the HTTP session were
encrypted, the tampering of the content would not be possible, and
these network injection attacks would not be successful.
While traffic manipulation attacks have long been known, documented,
and prototyped, especially in the context of Wi-Fi and LAN networks,
in the last few years we have observed an increasing investment in
the production and sale of network injection equipment that is both
commercially available and deployed at scale by intelligence
agencies.
For example, we learned from some of the documents provided by Edward
Snowden to the press that the NSA has constructed a global network
injection infrastructure, called "QUANTUM", able to leverage mass
surveillance in order to identify targets of interest and
subsequently task man-on-the-side attacks to ultimately compromise a
selected device. Among other attacks, the NSA makes use of an attack
called "QUANTUMINSERT" [Haagsma], which intercepts and hijacks an
unencrypted HTTP communication and forces the requesting browser to
redirect to a host controlled by the NSA instead of the intended
website. Normally, the new destination would be an exploitation
service, referred to in Snowden documents as "FOXACID", which would
attempt to execute malicious code in the context of the target's
browser. The Guardian reported in 2013 that the NSA has, for
example, been using these techniques to target users of the popular
anonymity service Tor [Schneier]. The German Norddeutscher Rundfunk
(NDR) reported in 2014 that the NSA has also been using its
mass-surveillance capabilities to identify Tor users at large
[Appelbaum].
Recently, similar capabilities used by Chinese authorities have been
reported as well in what has been informally called the "Great
Cannon" [Marcak], which raised numerous concerns on the potential
curb on human rights and freedom of speech due to the increasingly
tighter control of Chinese Internet communications and access to
information.
Network injection attacks are also made widely available to state
actors around the world through the commercialization of similar,
smaller-scale equipment that can be easily acquired and deployed at a
country-wide level. Certain companies are known to have network
injection gear within their products portfolio [Marquis-Boire]. The
technology devised and produced by some of them to perform network
traffic manipulation attacks on HTTP communications is even the
subject of a patent application in the United States [Googlepatent].
Access to offensive technologies available on the commercial lawful
interception market has led to human rights abuses and illegitimate
surveillance of journalists, human rights defenders, and political
activists in many countries around the world [Collins]. While
network injection attacks haven't been the subject of much attention,
they do enable even unskilled attackers to perform silent and very
resilient compromises, and unencrypted HTTP remains one of the main
vehicles.
There is a new version of HTTP, called "HTTP/2" [RFC7540], which aims
to be largely backwards compatible while also offering new options
such as data compression of HTTP headers, pipelining of requests, and
multiplexing multiple requests over a single TCP connection. In
addition to decreasing latency to improve page-loading speeds, it
also facilitates more efficient use of connectivity in low-bandwidth
environments, which in turn enables freedom of expression; the right
to assembly; the right to political participation; and the right to
participate in cultural life, arts, and science. [RFC7540] does not
mandate TLS or any other form of encryption, nor does it support
opportunistic encryption even though opportunistic encryption is now
addressed in [RFC8164].
5.2.3.4. XMPP
The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), specified in
[RFC6120], provides a standard for interactive chat messaging and has
evolved to encompass interoperable text, voice, and video chat. The
protocol is structured as a federated network of servers, similar to
email, where users register with a local server that acts on their
behalf to cache and relay messages. This protocol design has many
advantages, allowing servers to shield clients from denial of service
and other forms of retribution for their expression; it is also
designed to avoid central entities that could control the ability to
communicate or assemble using the protocol.
Nonetheless, there are plenty of aspects of the protocol design of
XMPP that shape the ability for users to communicate freely and to
assemble via the protocol.
5.2.3.4.1. User Identification
The XMPP specification [RFC6120] dictates that clients are identified
with a resource (<node@domain/home> / <node@domain/work>) to
distinguish the conversations to specific devices. While the
protocol does not specify that the resource must be exposed by the
client's server to remote users, in practice this has become the
default behavior. In doing so, users can be tracked by remote
friends and their servers, who are able to monitor the presence of
not just the user but of each individual device the user logs in
with. This has proven to be misleading to many users [Pidgin], since
many clients only expose user-level rather than device-level
presence. Likewise, user invisibility so that communication can
occur while users don't notify all buddies and other servers of their
availability is not part of the formal protocol and has only been
added as an extension within the XML stream rather than enforced by
the protocol.
5.2.3.4.2. Surveillance of Communication
XMPP specifies the standard by which communications channels may be
encrypted, but it does not provide visibility to clients regarding
whether their communications are encrypted on each link. In
particular, even when both clients ensure that they have an encrypted
connection to their XMPP server to ensure that their local network is
unable to read or disrupt the messages they send, the protocol does
not provide visibility into the encryption status between the two
servers. As such, clients may be subject to selective disruption of
communications by an intermediate network that disrupts
communications based on keywords found through DPI. While many
operators have committed to only establishing encrypted links from
their servers in recognition of this vulnerability, it remains
impossible for users to audit this behavior, and encrypted
connections are not required by the protocol itself [XMPP-Manifesto].
In particular, Section 13.14 of the XMPP specification [RFC6120]
explicitly acknowledges the existence of a downgrade attack where an
adversary controlling an intermediate network can force the
inter-domain federation between servers to revert to a non-encrypted
protocol where selective messages can then be disrupted.
5.2.3.4.3. Group Chat Limitations
Group chat in XMPP is defined as an extension within the XML
specification of XMPP (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html).
However, it is not encoded or required at a protocol level and is not
uniformly implemented by clients.
The design of multi-user chat in XMPP suffers from extending a
protocol that was not designed with assembly of many users in mind.
In particular, in the federated protocol provided by XMPP, multi-user
communities are implemented with a distinguished "owner" who is
granted control over the participants and structure of the
conversation.
Multi-user chat rooms are identified by a name specified on a
specific server, so that while the overall protocol may be federated,
the ability for users to assemble in a given community is moderated
by a single server. That server may block the room and prevent
assembly unilaterally, even between two users, neither of whom trust
or use that server directly.
5.2.3.5. Peer-to-Peer
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is a distributed network architecture [RFC5694] in
which all the participant nodes can be responsible for the storage
and dissemination of information from any other node (see [RFC7574],
an IETF standard that discusses a P2P architecture called the
"Peer-to-Peer Streaming Peer Protocol" (PPSPP)). A P2P network is a
logical overlay that lives on top of the physical network and allows
nodes (or "peers") participating in it to establish contact and
exchange information directly with each other. The implementation of
a P2P network may vary widely: it may be structured or unstructured,
and it may implement stronger or weaker cryptographic and anonymity
properties. While its most common application has traditionally been
file-sharing (and other types of content delivery systems), P2P is a
popular architecture for networks and applications that require (or
encourage) decentralization. Prime examples include Bitcoin and
other proprietary multimedia applications.
In a time of heavily centralized online services, P2P is regularly
described as an alternative, more democratic, and resistant option
that displaces structures of control over data and communications and
delegates all peers to be equally responsible for the functioning,
integrity, and security of the data. While in principle P2P remains
important to the design and development of future content
distribution, messaging, and publishing systems, it poses numerous
security and privacy challenges that are mostly delegated to
individual developers to recognize, analyze, and solve in each
implementation of a given P2P network.
5.2.3.5.1. Network Poisoning
Since content, and sometimes peer lists, are safeguarded and
distributed by their members, P2P networks are prone to what are
generally defined as "poisoning attacks". Poisoning attacks might be
aimed directly at the data that is being distributed, for example,
(1) by intentionally corrupting the data, (2) at the index tables
used to instruct the peers where to fetch the data, or (3) at routing
tables, with an attempt to provide connecting peers with lists of
rogue or nonexistent peers, with the intention to effectively cause a
denial of service on the network.
5.2.3.5.2. Throttling
P2P traffic (and BitTorrent in particular) represents a significant
percentage of global Internet traffic [Sandvine], and it has become
increasingly popular for ISPs to perform throttling of customers'
lines in order to limit bandwidth usage [torrentfreak1] and,
sometimes, probably as an effect of the ongoing conflict between
copyright holders and file-sharing communities [wikileaks]. Such
throttling undermines the end-to-end principle.
Throttling the P2P traffic makes some uses of P2P networks
ineffective; this throttling might be coupled with stricter
inspection of users' Internet traffic through DPI techniques,
possibly posing additional security and privacy risks.
5.2.3.5.3. Tracking and Identification
One of the fundamental and most problematic issues with traditional
P2P networks is a complete lack of anonymization of their users. For
example, in the case of BitTorrent, all peers' IP addresses are
openly available to the other peers. This has led to ever-increasing
tracking of P2P and file-sharing users [ars]. As the geographical
location of the user is directly exposed, as could also be his
identity, the user might become a target of additional harassment and
attacks of a physical or legal nature. For example, it is known that
in Germany law firms have made extensive use of P2P and file-sharing
tracking systems in order to identify downloaders and initiate legal
actions looking for compensations [torrentfreak2].
It is worth noting that there are some varieties of P2P networks that
implement cryptographic practices and that introduce anonymization of
their users. Such implementations may be proved to be successful in
resisting censorship of content and tracking of network peers. A
prime example is Freenet [freenet1], a free software application that
is (1) designed to make it significantly more difficult to identify
users and content and (2) dedicated to fostering freedom of speech
online [freenet2].
5.2.3.5.4. Sybil Attacks
In open-membership P2P networks, a single attacker can pretend to be
many participants, typically by creating multiple fake identities of
whatever kind the P2P network uses [Douceur]. Attackers can use
Sybil attacks to bias choices that the P2P network makes collectively
to the attacker's advantage, e.g., by making it more likely that a
particular data item (or some threshold of the replicas or shares of
a data item) is assigned to attacker-controlled participants. If the
P2P network implements any voting, moderation, or peer-review-like
functionality, Sybil attacks may be used to "stuff the ballots" to
benefit the attacker. Companies and governments can use Sybil
attacks on discussion-oriented P2P systems for "astroturfing" or
creating the appearance of mass grassroots support for some position
where in reality there is none. It is important to know that there
are no known complete, environmentally sustainable, and fully
distributed solutions to Sybil attacks, and routing via "friends"
allows users to be de-anonymized via their social graph. It is
important to note that Sybil attacks in this context (e.g.,
astroturfing) are relevant to more than P2P protocols; they are also
common on web-based systems, and they are exploited by governments
and commercial entities.
Encrypted P2P and anonymous P2P networks have already emerged. They
provide viable platforms for sharing material [Tribler], publishing
content anonymously, and communicating securely [Bitmessage]. These
platforms are not perfect, and more research needs to be done. If
adopted at large, well-designed and resistant P2P networks might
represent a critical component of a future secure and distributed
Internet, enabling freedom of speech and freedom of information
at scale.
5.2.3.6. Virtual Private Networks
The VPNs discussed here are point-to-point connections that enable
two computers to communicate over an encrypted tunnel. There are
multiple implementations and protocols used in the deployment of
VPNs, and they generally diversify by encryption protocol or
particular requirements, most commonly in proprietary and enterprise
solutions. VPNs are commonly used to (1) enable some devices to
communicate through peculiar network configurations, (2) use some
privacy and security properties in order to protect the traffic
generated by the end user, or both. VPNs have also become a very
popular technology among human rights defenders, dissidents, and
journalists worldwide to avoid local monitoring and eventually also
to circumvent censorship. VPNs are often debated among human rights
defenders as a potential alternative to Tor or other anonymous
networks. Such comparisons are misleading, as some of the privacy
and security properties of VPNs are often misunderstood by less
tech-savvy users and could ultimately lead to unintended problems.
As VPNs have increased in popularity, commercial VPN providers have
started growing as businesses and are very commonly picked by human
rights defenders and people at risk, as they are normally provided
with an easy-to-use service and, sometimes, even custom applications
to establish the VPN tunnel. Not being able to control the
configuration of the network, let alone the security of the
application, assessing the general privacy and security state of
common VPNs is very hard. Such services have often been discovered
to be leaking information, and their custom applications have been
found to be flawed. While Tor and similar networks receive a lot of
scrutiny from the public and the academic community, commercial or
non-commercial VPNs are far less analyzed and understood [Insinuator]
[Alshalan-etal], and it might be valuable to establish some standards
to guarantee a minimal level of privacy and security to those who
need them the most.
5.2.3.6.1. No Anonymity against VPN Providers
One of the common misconceptions among users of VPNs is the level of
anonymity that VPNs can provide. This sense of anonymity can be
betrayed by a number of attacks or misconfigurations of the VPN
provider. It is important to remember that, in contrast to Tor and
similar systems, VPNs were not designed to provide anonymity
properties. From a technical point of view, a VPN might leak
identifiable information or might be the subject of correlation
attacks that could expose the originating address of a connecting
user. Most importantly, it is vital to understand that commercial
and non-commercial VPN providers are bound by the law of the
jurisdiction in which they reside or in which their infrastructure is
located, and they might be legally forced to turn over data of
specific users if legal investigations or intelligence requirements
dictate so. In such cases, if the VPN providers retain logs, it is
possible that a user's information could be provided to the user's
adversary and lead to his or her identification.
5.2.3.6.2. Logging
Because VPNs are point-to-point connections, the service providers
are in fact able to observe the original location of connecting
users, and they are able to track at what time they started their
session and, eventually, also to which destinations they're trying to
connect. If the VPN providers retain logs for a long enough time,
they might be forced to turn over the relevant data or they might be
otherwise compromised, leading to the same data getting exposed. A
clear log-retention policy could be enforced, but considering that
countries enforce different levels of data-retention policies, VPN
providers should at least be transparent regarding what information
they store and for how long it is being kept.
5.2.3.6.3. Third-Party Hosting
VPN providers very commonly rely on third parties to provision the
infrastructure that is later going to be used to run VPN endpoints.
For example, they might rely on external dedicated server providers
or on uplink providers. In those cases, even if the VPN provider
itself isn't retaining any significant logs, the information on
connecting users might be retained by those third parties instead,
introducing an additional collection point for the adversary.
5.2.3.6.4. IPv6 Leakage
Some studies proved that several commercial VPN providers and
applications suffer from critical leakage of information through IPv6
due to improper support and configuration [PETS2015VPN]. This is
generally caused by a lack of proper configuration of the client's
IPv6 routing tables. Considering that most popular browsers and
similar applications have been supporting IPv6 by default, if the
host is provided with a functional IPv6 configuration, the traffic
that is generated might be leaked if the VPN application isn't
designed to manipulate such traffic properly.
5.2.3.6.5. DNS Leakage
Similarly, VPN services that aren't handling DNS requests and aren't
running DNS servers of their own might be prone to DNS leaking that
might not only expose sensitive information on the activity of a user
but could also potentially lead to DNS hijacking attacks and
subsequent compromises.
5.2.3.6.6. Traffic Correlation
Some VPN implementations appear to be particularly vulnerable to
identification and collection of key exchanges that, some Snowden
documents revealed, are systematically collected and stored for
future reference. The ability of an adversary to monitor network
connections at many different points over the Internet can allow them
to perform traffic correlation attacks and identify the origin of
certain VPN traffic by cross-referencing the connection time of the
user to the endpoint and the connection time of the endpoint to the
final destination. These types of attacks, although very expensive
and normally only performed by very resourceful adversaries, have
been documented [SPIEGEL] to be already in practice, and they could
completely nullify the use of a VPN and ultimately expose the
activity and the identity of a user at risk.
5.2.3.7. HTTP Status Code 451
"Every Internet user has run into the '404 Not Found' Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP) status code when trying, and failing, to
access a particular website" [Cath]. It is a response status that
the server sends to the browser when the server cannot locate the
URL. "403 Forbidden" is another example of this class of code signals
that gives users information about what is going on. In the "403"
case, the server can be reached but is blocking the request because
the user is trying to access content forbidden to them, typically
because some content is only for identified users, based on a payment
or on special status in the organization. Most of the time, 403 is
sent by the origin server, not by an intermediary. If a firewall
prevents a government employee from accessing pornography on a work
computer, it does not use 403.
As surveillance and censorship of the Internet are becoming more
commonplace, voices were raised at the IETF to introduce a new status
code that indicates when something is not available for "legal
reasons" (like censorship):
The 451 status code would allow server operators to operate with
greater transparency in circumstances where issues of law or public
policy affect their operation. This transparency may be beneficial
to both (1) these operators and (2) end users [RFC7725].
The status code is named "451" in reference to both Bradbury's famous
novel "Fahrenheit 451" and to 451 degrees Fahrenheit (the temperature
at which some claim book paper autoignites).
During the IETF 92 meeting in Dallas, there was discussion about the
usefulness of 451. The main tension revolved around the lack of an
apparent machine-readable technical use of the information. The
extent to which 451 is just "political theatre" or whether it has a
concrete technical use was heatedly debated. Some argued that "the
451 status code is just a status code with a response body"; others
said it was problematic because "it brings law into the picture."
Still others argued that it would be useful for individuals or for
organizations like the "Chilling Effects" project that are crawling
the Web to get an indication of censorship (IETF discussion on 451 --
author's field notes, March 2015). There was no outright objection
during the Dallas meeting against moving forward on status code 451,
and on December 18, 2015, the IESG approved "An HTTP Status Code to
Report Legal Obstacles" (now [RFC7725]) for publication. HTTP status
code 451 is now an IETF-approved HTTP status code that signals when
resource access is denied as a consequence of legal demands.
What is interesting about this particular case is that not only
technical arguments but also the status code's outright potential
political use for civil society played a substantial role in shaping
the discussion and the decision to move forward with this technology.
It is nonetheless important to note that HTTP status code 451 is not
a solution to detect all occasions of censorship. A large swath of
Internet filtering occurs in the network, at a lower level than HTTP,
rather than at the server itself. For these forms of censorship, 451
plays a limited role, as typical censoring intermediaries won't
generate it. Besides technical reasons, such filtering regimes are
unlikely to voluntarily inject a 451 status code. The use of 451 is
most likely to apply in the case of cooperative, legal versions of
content removal resulting from requests to providers. One can think
of content that is removed or blocked for legal reasons, like
copyright infringement, gambling laws, child abuse, etc. Large
Internet companies and search engines are constantly asked to censor
content in various jurisdictions. 451 allows this to be easily
discovered -- for instance, by initiatives like the Lumen Database.
Overall, the strength of 451 lies in its ability to provide
transparency by giving the reason for blocking and giving the
end user the ability to file a complaint. It allows organizations to
easily measure censorship in an automated way and prompts the user to
access the content via another path (e.g., Tor, VPNs) when (s)he
encounters the 451 status code.
Status code 451 impacts human rights by making censorship more
transparent and measurable. It increases transparency by signaling
the existence of censorship (instead of a much broader HTTP error
message such as HTTP status code 404) as well as providing details of
the legal restriction, which legal authority is imposing it, and to
what class of resources it applies. This empowers the user to seek
redress.
5.2.3.8. DDoS Attacks
Many individuals, including IETF engineers, have argued that DDoS
attacks are fundamentally against freedom of expression.
Technically, DDoS attacks are attacks where one host or multiple
hosts overload the bandwidth or resources of another host by flooding
it with traffic or making resource-intensive requests, causing it to
temporarily stop being available to users. One can roughly
differentiate three types of DDoS attacks:
1. volume-based attacks (which aim to make the host unreachable by
using up all its bandwidth; often-used techniques are UDP floods
and ICMP floods)
2. protocol attacks (which aim to use up actual server resources;
often-used techniques are SYN floods, fragmented packet attacks,
and "ping of death" [RFC4949])
3. application-layer attacks (which aim to bring down a server, such
as a web server)
DDoS attacks can thus stifle freedom of expression and complicate the
ability of independent media and human rights organizations to
exercise their right to (online) freedom of association, while
facilitating the ability of governments to censor dissent. When it
comes to comparing DDoS attacks to protests in offline life, it is
important to remember that only a limited number of DDoS attacks
solely involved willing participants. In the overwhelming majority
of cases, the clients are hacked hosts of unrelated parties that
have not consented to being part of a DDoS (for exceptions, see
Operation Ababil [Ababil] or the Iranian Green Movement's DDoS
campaign at election time [GreenMovement]). In addition,
DDoS attacks are increasingly used as an extortion tactic.
All of these issues seem to suggest that the IETF should try to
ensure that their protocols cannot be used for DDoS attacks; this is
consistent with the long-standing IETF consensus that DDoS is an
attack that protocols should mitigate to the extent they can [BCP72].
Decreasing the number of vulnerabilities in protocols and (outside of
the IETF) the number of bugs in the network stacks of routers or
computers could address this issue. The IETF can clearly play a role
in bringing about some of these changes, but the IETF cannot be
expected to take a positive stance on (specific) DDoS attacks or to
create protocols that enable some attacks and inhibit others. What
the IETF can do is critically reflect on its role in the development
of the Internet and how this impacts the ability of people to
exercise their human rights, such as freedom of expression.
6. Model for Developing Human Rights Protocol Considerations
This section outlines a set of human rights protocol considerations
for protocol developers. It provides questions that engineers should
ask themselves when developing or improving protocols if they want to
understand their impact on human rights. It should, however, be
noted that the impact of a protocol cannot be solely deduced from its
design; its usage and implementation should also be studied to form a
full assessment of the impact of the protocol on human rights.
The questions are based on the research performed by the HRPC
Research Group. This research was documented prior to the writing of
these considerations. The research establishes that human rights
relate to standards and protocols; it also offers a common vocabulary
of technical concepts that impact human rights and how these
technical concepts can be combined to ensure that the Internet
remains an enabling environment for human rights. With this, a model
for developing human rights protocol considerations has taken shape.
6.1. Human Rights Threats
Human rights threats on the Internet come in a myriad of forms.
Protocols and standards can either harm or enable the right to
freedom of expression; the right to non-discrimination; the right to
equal protection; the right to participate in cultural life, arts,
and science; the right to freedom of assembly and association; and
the right to security. An end user who is denied access to certain
services, data, or websites may be unable to disclose vital
information about malpractice on the part of a government or other
authority. A person whose communications are monitored may be
prevented from exercising their right to freedom of association or
participation in political processes [Penney]. In a worst-case
scenario, protocols that leak information can lead to physical
danger. A realistic example to consider is when, based on
information gathered by state agencies through information leakage in
protocols, individuals perceived as threats to the state are
subjected to torture, extrajudicial killings, or detention.
This section details several "common" threats to human rights,
indicating how each of these can lead to harm to, or violations of,
human rights. It also presents several examples of how these threats
to human rights materialize on the Internet. This threat modeling is
inspired by [RFC6973] ("Privacy Considerations for Internet
Protocols"), which is based on security threat analysis. This method
is by no means a perfect solution for assessing human rights risks in
Internet protocols and systems; it is, however, the best approach
currently available. Certain specific human rights threats are
indirectly considered in Internet protocols as part of their security
considerations [BCP72], but privacy guidelines [RFC6973] or reviews,
let alone the assessments of the impact of protocols on human rights,
are not standardized or implemented.
Many threats, enablers, and risks are linked to different rights.
This is not surprising if one takes into account that human rights
are interrelated, interdependent, and indivisible. Here, however,
we're not discussing all human rights, because not all human rights
are relevant to ICTs in general and to protocols and standards in
particular [Bless1]:
The main source of the values of human rights is the International
Bill of Human Rights that is composed of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights [UDHR] along with the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR] and the International Covenant
on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights [ICESCR]. In the light of
several cases of Internet censorship, the Human Rights Council
Resolution 20/8 was adopted in 2012 [UNHRC2016], affirming "...
that the same rights that people have offline must also be
protected online ..." In 2015, the Charter of Human Rights and
Principles for the Internet [IRP] was developed and released.
According to these documents, some examples of human rights
relevant for ICT systems are human dignity (Art. 1 UDHR),
non-discrimination (Art. 2), rights to life, liberty and security
(Art. 3), freedom of opinion and expression (Art. 19), freedom of
assembly and association (Art. 20), rights to equal protection,
legal remedy, fair trial, due process, presumed innocent
(Art. 7-11), appropriate social and international order (Art. 28),
participation in public affairs (Art. 21), participation in
cultural life, protection of intellectual property (Art. 27), and
privacy (Art. 12).
A partial catalog of human rights related to ICTs, including economic
rights, can be found in [Hill2014].
This is by no means an attempt to exclude specific rights or
prioritize some rights over others. If other rights seem relevant,
please contact the authors of this document.
6.2. Guidelines for Human Rights Considerations
This section provides guidance for document authors in the form of a
questionnaire about protocols and their (potential) impact. The
questionnaire may be useful at any point in the design process,
particularly after document authors have developed a high-level
protocol model as described in [RFC4101]. These guidelines do not
seek to replace any existing referenced specifications; rather, they
contribute to them and look at the design process from a human rights
perspective.
Protocols and Internet Standards might benefit from a documented
discussion of potential human rights risks arising from potential
misapplications of the protocol or technology described in the RFC in
question. This might be coupled with an Applicability Statement for
that RFC.
Note that the guidance provided in this section does not recommend
specific practices. The range of protocols developed in the IETF is
too broad to make recommendations about particular uses of data or
how human rights might be balanced against other design goals.
However, by carefully considering the answers to the following
questions, document authors should be able to produce a comprehensive
analysis that can serve as the basis for discussion on whether the
protocol adequately takes specific human rights threats into account.
This guidance is meant to help the thought process of a human rights
analysis; it does not provide specific directions for how to write a
human rights protocol considerations section (following the example
set in [RFC6973]), and the addition of a human rights protocol
considerations section has also not yet been proposed. In
considering these questions, authors will need to be aware of the
potential of technical advances or the passage of time to undermine
protections. In general, considerations of rights are likely to be
more effective if they are considered given a purpose and specific
use cases, rather than as abstract absolute goals.
6.2.1. Connectivity
Questions:
- Does your protocol add application-specific functions to
intermediary nodes?
- Could this functionality be added to end nodes instead of
intermediary nodes?
- Is your protocol optimized for low bandwidth and high-latency
connections?
- Could your protocol also be developed in a stateless manner?
Explanation: The end-to-end principle [Saltzer] holds that "the
intelligence is end to end rather than hidden in the network"
[RFC1958]. The end-to-end principle is important for the
robustness of the network and innovation. Such robustness of the
network is crucial to enabling human rights like freedom of
expression.
Example: Middleboxes (which can be content delivery networks,
firewalls, NATs, or other intermediary nodes that provide
"services" other than routing) serve many legitimate purposes.
But the protocols guiding them can influence individuals' ability
to communicate online freely and privately. The potential for
abuse, intentional and unintentional censoring, and limiting
permissionless innovation -- and thus, ultimately, the impact of
middleboxes on the Internet as a place of unfiltered, unmonitored
freedom of speech -- is real.
Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to freedom of assembly and association
6.2.2. Privacy
Questions:
- Did you have a look at the guidelines in Section 7 of [RFC6973]
("Privacy Considerations for Internet Protocols")?
- Could your protocol in any way impact the confidentiality of
protocol metadata?
- Could your protocol counter traffic analysis?
- Could your protocol improve data minimization?
- Does your document identify potentially sensitive data logged by
your protocol and/or for how long that data needs to be retained
for technical reasons?
Explanation: "Privacy" refers to the right of an entity (normally a
person), acting on its own behalf, to determine the degree to
which it will interact with its environment, including the degree
to which the entity is willing to share its personal information
with others [RFC4949]. If a protocol provides insufficient
privacy protection, it may have a negative impact on freedom of
expression as users self-censor for fear of surveillance or find
themselves unable to express themselves freely.
Example: See [RFC6973].
Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to non-discrimination
6.2.3. Content Agnosticism
Questions:
- If your protocol impacts packet handling, does it use user data
(packet data that is not included in the header)?
- Does your protocol make decisions based on the payload of the
packet?
- Does your protocol prioritize certain content or services over
others in the routing process?
- Is the protocol transparent about the prioritization that is made
(if any)?
Explanation: "Content agnosticism" refers to the notion that network
traffic is treated identically regardless of payload, with some
exceptions when it comes to effective traffic handling -- for
instance, delay-tolerant or delay-sensitive packets based on the
header.
Example: Content agnosticism prevents payload-based discrimination
against packets. This is important because changes to this
principle can lead to a two-tiered Internet, where certain packets
are prioritized over others based on their content. Effectively,
this would mean that although all users are entitled to receive
their packets at a certain speed, some users become more equal
than others.
Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to non-discrimination
- Right to equal protection
6.2.4. Security
Questions:
- Did you have a look at [BCP72] ("Guidelines for Writing RFC Text
on Security Considerations")?
- Have you found any attacks that are somewhat related to your
protocol yet considered out of scope for your document?
- Would these attacks be pertinent to the features of the Internet
that enable human rights (as described throughout this document)?
Explanation: Most people speak of security as if it were a single
monolithic property of a protocol or system; however, upon
reflection one realizes that it is clearly not true. Rather,
security is a series of related but somewhat independent
properties. Not all of these properties are required for every
application. Since communications are carried out by systems and
access to systems is through communications channels, these goals
obviously interlock, but they can also be independently provided
[BCP72].
Example: See [BCP72].
Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to freedom of assembly and association
- Right to non-discrimination
- Right to security
6.2.5. Internationalization
Questions:
- Does your protocol have text strings that have to be understood or
entered by humans?
- Does your protocol allow Unicode? If so, do you accept texts in
one charset (which must be UTF-8) or several (which is dangerous
for interoperability)?
- If character sets or encodings other than UTF-8 are allowed, does
your protocol mandate proper tagging of the charset?
- Did you have a look at [RFC6365]?
Explanation: "Internationalization" refers to the practice of making
protocols, standards, and implementations usable in different
languages and scripts (see Section 6.2.12 ("Localization")). "In
the IETF, 'internationalization' means to add or improve the
handling of non-ASCII text in a protocol" [RFC6365].
A different perspective, more appropriate to protocols that are
designed for global use from the beginning, is the definition used
by the W3C [W3Ci18nDef]: "Internationalization is the design and
development of a product, application or document content that
enables easy localization for target audiences that vary in
culture, region, or language."
Many protocols that handle text only handle one charset
(US-ASCII), or they leave the question of what coded character set
(CCS) and encoding are used up to local guesswork (which leads, of
course, to interoperability problems) [RFC3536]. If multiple
charsets are permitted, they must be explicitly identified
[RFC2277]. Adding non-ASCII text to a protocol allows the
protocol to handle more scripts, hopefully all scripts in use in
the world. In today's world, that is normally best accomplished
by allowing Unicode encoded in UTF-8 only.
In the current IETF policy [RFC2277], internationalization is
aimed at user-facing strings, not protocol elements, such as the
verbs used by some text-based protocols. (Do note that some
strings, such as identifiers, are both content and protocol
elements.) If the Internet wants to be a global network of
networks, the protocols should work with languages other than
English and character sets other than Latin characters. It is
therefore crucial that at least the content carried by the
protocol can be in any script and that all scripts are treated
equally.
Example: See Section 6.2.12 ("Localization").
Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to political participation
- Right to participate in cultural life, arts, and science
6.2.6. Censorship Resistance
Questions:
- Does this protocol introduce new identifiers or reuse existing
identifiers (e.g., Media Access Control (MAC) addresses) that
might be associated with persons or content?
- Does your protocol make it apparent or transparent when access to
a resource is restricted?
- Can your protocol contribute to filtering in such a way that it
could be implemented to censor data or services? If so, could
your protocol be designed to ensure that this doesn't happen?
Explanation: "Censorship resistance" refers to the methods and
measures to prevent Internet censorship.
Example: When IPv6 was developed, embedding a MAC address into
unique IP addresses was discussed. This makes it possible, per
[RFC4941], for "eavesdroppers and other information collectors to
identify when different addresses used in different transactions
actually correspond to the same node." This is why privacy
extensions for stateless address autoconfiguration in IPv6
[RFC4941] have been introduced.
Identifiers of content exposed within a protocol might be used to
facilitate censorship, as in the case of application-layer-based
censorship, which affects protocols like HTTP. Denial or
restriction of access can be made apparent by the use of status
code 451, thereby allowing server operators to operate with
greater transparency in circumstances where issues of law or
public policy affect their operation [RFC7725].
Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to political participation
- Right to participate in cultural life, arts, and science
- Right to freedom of assembly and association
6.2.7. Open Standards
Questions:
- Is your protocol fully documented in such a way that it could be
easily implemented, improved, built upon, and/or further
developed?
- Do you depend on proprietary code for the implementation, running,
or further development of your protocol?
- Does your protocol favor a particular proprietary specification
over technically equivalent and competing specification(s) -- for
instance, by making any incorporated vendor specification
"required" or "recommended" [RFC2026]?
- Do you normatively reference another standard that is not
available without cost (and could you possibly do without it)?
- Are you aware of any patents that would prevent your standard from
being fully implemented [RFC6701] [RFC8179]?
Explanation: The Internet was able to be developed into the global
network of networks because of the existence of open,
non-proprietary standards [Zittrain]. They are crucial for
enabling interoperability. Yet, open standards are not explicitly
defined within the IETF. On the subject, [RFC2026] states the
following: "Various national and international standards bodies,
such as ANSI, ISO, IEEE, and ITU-T, develop a variety of protocol
and service specifications that are similar to Technical
Specifications defined" at the IETF. "National and international
groups also publish 'implementors' agreements' that are analogous
to Applicability Statements, capturing a body of implementation-
specific detail concerned with the practical application of their
standards. All of these are considered to be 'open external
standards' for the purposes of the Internet Standards Process."
Similarly, [RFC3935] does not define open standards but does
emphasize the importance of "open process": any interested person
can participate in the work, know what is being decided, and make
his or her voice heard on the issue. Part of this principle is
the IETF's commitment to making its documents, WG mailing lists,
attendance lists, and meeting minutes publicly available on the
Internet.
Open standards are important, as they allow for permissionless
innovation, which in turn is important for maintaining the freedom
and ability to freely create and deploy new protocols on top of
the communications constructs that currently exist. It is at the
heart of the Internet as we know it, and to maintain its
fundamentally open nature, we need to be mindful of the need for
developing open standards.
All standards that need to be normatively implemented should be
freely available and should provide reasonable protection against
patent infringement claims, so that it can also be implemented in
open-source or free software. Patents have often held back open
standardization or have been used against those deploying open
standards, particularly in the domain of cryptography [Newegg].
An exemption is sometimes made when a protocol that normatively
relies on specifications produced by other SDOs that are not
freely available is standardized. Patents in open standards or in
normative references to other standards should have a patent
disclosure [notewell], royalty-free licensing [patentpolicy], or
some other form of reasonable protection. Reasonable patent
protection should include, but is not limited to, cryptographic
primitives.
Example: [RFC6108] describes a system deployed by Comcast, an ISP,
for providing critical end-user notifications to web browsers.
Such a notification system is being used to provide
almost-immediate notifications to customers, such as warning them
that their traffic exhibits patterns that are indicative of
malware or virus infection. There are other proprietary systems
that can perform such notifications, but those systems utilize
Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology. In contrast to DPI,
[RFC6108] describes a system that does not rely upon DPI and is
instead based on open IETF standards and open-source applications.
Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to participate in cultural life, arts, and science
6.2.8. Heterogeneity Support
Questions:
- Does your protocol support heterogeneity by design?
- Does your protocol allow for multiple types of hardware?
- Does your protocol allow for multiple types of application
protocols?
- Is your protocol liberal in what it receives and handles?
- Will your protocol remain usable and open if the context changes?
- Does your protocol allow well-defined extension points? If so, do
these extension points allow for open innovation?
Explanation: [FIArch] notes the following: "The Internet is
characterized by heterogeneity on many levels: devices and nodes,
router scheduling algorithms and queue management mechanisms,
routing protocols, levels of multiplexing, protocol versions and
implementations, underlying link layers (e.g., point-to-point,
multi-access links, wireless, FDDI, etc.), in the traffic mix and
in the levels of congestion at different times and places.
Moreover, as the Internet is composed of autonomous organizations
and internet service providers, each with their own separate
policy concerns, there is a large heterogeneity of administrative
domains and pricing structures." As a result, as also noted in
[FIArch], the heterogeneity principle proposed in [RFC1958] needs
to be supported by design.
Example: Heterogeneity is inevitable and needs to be supported by
design. For example, multiple types of hardware must be allowed
for transmission speeds differing by at least seven orders of
magnitude, various computer word lengths, and hosts ranging from
memory-starved microprocessors up to massively parallel
supercomputers. As noted in [RFC1958], "Multiple types of
application protocol must be allowed for, ranging from the
simplest such as remote login up to the most complex such as
distributed databases."
Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to political participation
6.2.9. Anonymity
Question:
- Did you have a look at [RFC6973] ("Privacy Considerations for
Internet Protocols"), especially Section 6.1.1 of that document?
Explanation: "Anonymity" refers to the condition of an identity
being unknown or concealed [RFC4949]. Even though full anonymity
is hard to achieve, it is a non-binary concept. Making pervasive
monitoring and tracking harder is important for many users as well
as for the IETF [RFC7258]. Achieving a higher level of anonymity
is an important feature for many end users, as it allows them
different degrees of privacy online.
Example: Protocols often expose personal data; it is therefore
important to consider ways to mitigate the obvious impacts on
privacy. A protocol that uses data that could help identify a
sender (items of interest) should be protected from third parties.
For instance, if one wants to hide the source/destination IP
addresses of a packet, the use of IPsec in tunneling mode (e.g.,
inside a VPN) can help protect against third parties likely to
eavesdrop packets exchanged between the tunnel endpoints.
Impacts:
- Right to non-discrimination
- Right to political participation
- Right to freedom of assembly and association
- Right to security
6.2.10. Pseudonymity
Questions:
- Have you considered [RFC6973] ("Privacy Considerations for
Internet Protocols"), especially Section 6.1.2 of that document?
- Does the protocol collect personally derived data?
- Does the protocol generate or process anything that can be, or
that can be tightly correlated with, personally identifiable
information?
- Does the protocol utilize data that is personally derived, i.e.,
derived from the interaction of a single person or from their
device or address?
- Does this protocol generate personally derived data? If so, how
will that data be handled?
Explanation: Pseudonymity -- the ability to use a persistent
identifier that is not immediately linked to one's offline
identity -- is an important feature for many end users, as it
allows them different degrees of disguised identity and privacy
online.
Example: When designing a standard that exposes personal data, it is
important to consider ways to mitigate the obvious impacts. While
pseudonyms cannot easily be reverse-engineered -- for example,
some early approaches used such techniques as simple hashing of IP
addresses that could in turn be easily reversed by generating a
hash for each potential IP address and comparing it to the
pseudonym -- limiting the exposure of personal data remains
important.
"Pseudonymity" means using a pseudonym instead of one's "real"
name. There are many reasons for users to use pseudonyms -- for
instance, to hide their gender; protect themselves against
harassment; protect their families' privacy; frankly discuss
sexuality; or develop an artistic or journalistic persona without
retribution from an employer, (potential) customers, or social
surroundings [geekfeminism]. The difference between anonymity and
pseudonymity is that a pseudonym is often persistent.
"Pseudonymity is strengthened when less personal data can be
linked to the pseudonym; when the same pseudonym is used less
often and across fewer contexts; and when independently chosen
pseudonyms are more frequently used for new actions (making them,
from an observer's or attacker's perspective, unlinkable)."
[RFC6973]
Impacts:
- Right to non-discrimination
- Right to freedom of assembly and association
6.2.11. Accessibility
Questions:
- Is your protocol designed to provide an enabling environment for
people who are not able-bodied?
- Have you looked at the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative
[W3CAccessibility] for examples and guidance?
Explanation: The Internet is fundamentally designed to work for all
people, whatever their hardware, software, language, culture,
location, or physical or mental ability. When the Internet meets
this goal, it is accessible to people with a diverse range of
hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive abilities
[W3CAccessibility]. Sometimes, in the design of protocols,
websites, web technologies, or web tools, barriers that exclude
people from using the Web are created.
Example: The HTML protocol as defined in [HTML5] specifically
requires that (with a few exceptions) every image must have an
"alt" attribute to ensure that images are accessible for people
that cannot themselves decipher non-text content in web pages.
Impacts:
- Right to non-discrimination
- Right to freedom of assembly and association
- Right to education
- Right to political participation
6.2.12. Localization
Questions:
- Does your protocol uphold the standards of internationalization?
- Have you taken any concrete steps towards localizing your protocol
for relevant audiences?
Explanation: Per [W3Ci18nDef], "Localization refers to the
adaptation of a product, application or document content to meet
the language, cultural and other requirements of a specific target
market (a 'locale')." It is also described as the practice of
translating an implementation to make it functional in a specific
language or for users in a specific locale (see Section 6.2.5
("Internationalization")).
Example: The Internet is a global medium, but many of its protocols
and products are developed with a certain audience in mind; this
audience often shares particular characteristics like knowing how
to read and write in ASCII and knowing English. This limits the
ability of a large part of the world's online population to use
the Internet in a way that is culturally and linguistically
accessible. An example of a protocol that has taken into account
the view that individuals like to have access to data in their
native language can be found in [RFC5646]; such a protocol would
label the information content with an identifier for the language
in which it is written and would allow information to be presented
in more than one language.
Impacts:
- Right to non-discrimination
- Right to participate in cultural life, arts, and science
- Right to freedom of expression
6.2.13. Decentralization
Questions:
- Can your protocol be implemented without one single point of
control?
- If applicable, can your protocol be deployed in a federated
manner?
- What is the potential for discrimination against users of your
protocol?
- Can your protocol be used to negatively implicate users (e.g.,
incrimination, accusation)?
- Does your protocol create additional centralized points of
control?
Explanation: Decentralization is one of the central technical
concepts of the architecture of networks and is embraced as such
by the IETF [RFC3935]. It refers to the absence or minimization
of centralized points of control -- "a feature that is assumed to
make it easy for new users to join and new uses to unfold"
[Brown]. It also reduces issues surrounding single points of
failure and distributes the network such that it continues to
function if one or several nodes are disabled. With the
commercialization of the Internet in the early 1990s, there has
been a slow trend toward moving away from decentralization, to the
detriment of any technical benefits that having a decentralized
Internet otherwise provides.
Example: The bits traveling the Internet are increasingly
susceptible to monitoring and censorship, from both governments
and ISPs, as well as third (malicious) parties. The ability to
monitor and censor is further enabled by increased centralization
of the network, creating central infrastructure points that can be
tapped into. The creation of P2P networks and the development of
voice-over-IP protocols using P2P technology in combination with a
distributed hash table (DHT) for scalability are examples of how
protocols can preserve decentralization [Pouwelse].
Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to freedom of assembly and association
6.2.14. Reliability
Questions:
- Is your protocol fault tolerant?
- Does your protocol degrade gracefully?
- Can your protocol resist malicious degradation attempts?
- Do you have a documented way to announce degradation?
- Do you have measures in place for recovery or partial healing from
failure?
- Can your protocol maintain dependability and performance in the
face of unanticipated changes or circumstances?
Explanation: Reliability ensures that a protocol will execute its
function consistently, be error resistant as described, and
function without unexpected results. A system that is reliable
degenerates gracefully and will have a documented way to announce
degradation. It also has mechanisms to recover from failure
gracefully and, if applicable, to allow for partial healing. It
is important here to draw a distinction between random degradation
and malicious degradation. Many current attacks against TLS, for
example, exploit TLS's ability to gracefully degrade to older
cipher suites; from a functional perspective, this ability is
good, but from a security perspective, it can be very bad. As
with confidentiality, the growth of the Internet and fostering
innovation in services depend on users having confidence and trust
[RFC3724] in the network. For reliability, it is necessary that
services notify users if packet delivery fails. In the case of
real-time systems, the protocol needs to safeguard timeliness in
addition to providing reliable delivery.
Example: In the modern IP stack structure, a reliable transport
layer requires an indication that transport processing has
successfully completed, such as the indication given by TCP's ACK
message [RFC793] and not simply an indication from the IP layer
that the packet arrived. Similarly, an application-layer protocol
may require an application-specific acknowledgement that contains,
among other things, a status code indicating the disposition of
the request (see [RFC3724]).
Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to security
6.2.15. Confidentiality
Questions:
- Does this protocol expose information related to identifiers or
data? If so, does it do so to each of the other protocol entities
(i.e., recipients, intermediaries, and enablers) [RFC6973]?
- What options exist for protocol implementers to choose to limit
the information shared with each entity?
- What operational controls are available to limit the information
shared with each entity?
- What controls or consent mechanisms does the protocol define or
require before personal data or identifiers are shared or exposed
via the protocol? If no such mechanisms or controls are
specified, is it expected that control and consent will be handled
outside of the protocol?
- Does the protocol provide ways for initiators to share different
pieces of information with different recipients? If not, are
there mechanisms that exist outside of the protocol to provide
initiators with such control?
- Does the protocol provide ways for initiators to limit which
information is shared with intermediaries? If not, are there
mechanisms that exist outside of the protocol to provide users
with such control?
- Is it expected that users will have relationships that govern the
use of the information (contractual or otherwise) with those who
operate these intermediaries?
- Does the protocol prefer encryption over cleartext operation?
- Does the protocol provide ways for initiators to express
individuals' preferences to recipients or intermediaries with
regard to the collection, use, or disclosure of their personal
data?
Explanation: "Confidentiality" refers to keeping a user's data
secret from unintended listeners [BCP72]. The growth of the
Internet depends on users having confidence that the network
protects their personal data [RFC1984].
Example: Protocols that do not encrypt their payload make the entire
content of the communication available to the idealized attacker
along their path [RFC7624]. Following the advice in [RFC3365],
most such protocols have a secure variant that encrypts the
payload for confidentiality, and these secure variants are seeing
ever-wider deployment. A noteworthy exception is DNS [RFC1035],
as DNSSEC [RFC4033] does not have confidentiality as a
requirement. This implies that, in the absence of changes to the
protocol as presently under development in the IETF's DNS Private
Exchange (DPRIVE) Working Group, all DNS queries and answers
generated by the activities of any protocol are available to the
attacker. When store-and-forward protocols are used (e.g., SMTP
[RFC5321]), intermediaries leave this data subject to observation
by an attacker that has compromised these intermediaries, unless
the data is encrypted end to end by the application-layer protocol
or the implementation uses an encrypted store for this data
[RFC7624].
Impacts:
- Right to privacy
- Right to security
6.2.16. Integrity
Questions:
- Does your protocol maintain, assure, and/or verify the accuracy of
payload data?
- Does your protocol maintain and assure the consistency of data?
- Does your protocol in any way allow the data to be (intentionally
or unintentionally) altered?
Explanation: "Integrity" refers to the maintenance and assurance of
the accuracy and consistency of data to ensure that it has not
been (intentionally or unintentionally) altered.
Example: Integrity verification of data is important for preventing
vulnerabilities and attacks such as man-in-the-middle attacks.
These attacks happen when a third party (often for malicious
reasons) intercepts a communication between two parties, inserting
themselves in the middle and changing the content of the data. In
practice, this looks as follows:
Alice wants to communicate with Bob.
Corinne forges and sends a message to Bob, impersonating Alice.
Bob cannot see that the data from Alice was altered by Corinne.
Corinne intercepts and alters the communication as it is sent
between Alice and Bob.
Corinne is able to control the communication content.
Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to security
6.2.17. Authenticity
Questions:
- Do you have sufficient measures in place to confirm the truth of
an attribute of an entity or of a single piece of data?
- Can attributes get garbled along the way (see Section 6.2.4
("Security"))?
- If relevant, have you implemented IPsec, DNSSEC, HTTPS, and other
standard security best practices?
Explanation: Authenticity ensures that data does indeed come from
the source it claims to come from. This is important for
preventing (1) certain attacks or (2) unauthorized access to, and
use of, data.
Example: Authentication of data is important for preventing
vulnerabilities and attacks such as man-in-the-middle attacks.
These attacks happen when a third party (often for malicious
reasons) intercepts a communication between two parties, inserting
themselves in the middle and posing as both parties. In practice,
this looks as follows:
Alice wants to communicate with Bob.
Alice sends data to Bob.
Corinne intercepts the data sent to Bob.
Corinne reads and alters the message to Bob.
Bob cannot see that the data did not come from Alice but instead
came from Corinne.
When there is proper authentication, the scenario would be as
follows:
Alice wants to communicate with Bob.
Alice sends data to Bob.
Corinne intercepts the data sent to Bob.
Corinne reads and alters the message to Bob.
Bob can see that the data did not come from Alice but instead came
from Corinne.
Impacts:
- Right to privacy
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to security
6.2.18. Adaptability
Questions:
- Is your protocol written in such a way that it would be easy for
other protocols to be developed on top of it or to interact
with it?
- Does your protocol impact permissionless innovation (see
Section 6.2.1 ("Connectivity") above)?
Explanation: Adaptability is closely interrelated with
permissionless innovation; both maintain the freedom and ability
to freely create and deploy new protocols on top of the
communications constructs that currently exist. Permissionless
innovation is at the heart of the Internet as we know it. To
maintain the Internet's fundamentally open nature and ensure that
it can continue to develop, we need to be mindful of the impact of
protocols on maintaining or reducing permissionless innovation.
Example: WebRTC generates audio and/or video data. In order to
ensure that WebRTC can be used in different locations by different
parties, it is important that standard JavaScript APIs be
developed to support applications from different voice service
providers. Multiple parties will have similar capabilities; in
order to ensure that all parties can build upon existing
standards, these standards need to be adaptable and allow for
permissionless innovation.
Impacts:
- Right to education
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to freedom of assembly and association
6.2.19. Outcome Transparency
Question:
- Are the effects of your protocol fully and easily comprehensible,
including with respect to unintended consequences of protocol
choices?
Explanation: Certain technical choices may have unintended
consequences.
Example: Lack of authenticity may lead to lack of integrity and
negative externalities; spam is an example. Lack of data that
could be used for billing and accounting can lead to so-called
"free" arrangements that obscure the actual costs and distribution
of the costs -- for example, (1) the barter arrangements that are
commonly used for Internet interconnection and (2) the commercial
exploitation of personal data for targeted advertising, which is
the most common funding model for the so-called "free" services
such as search engines and social networks.
Impacts:
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to privacy
- Right to freedom of assembly and association
- Right to access to information
7. Security Considerations
As this document discusses research, there are no security
considerations.
8. IANA Considerations
This document does not require any IANA actions.
9. Research Group Information
The discussion list for the IRTF Human Rights Protocol Considerations
Research Group is located at the email address <hrpc@ietf.org>.
Information on the group and information on how to subscribe to the
list are provided at <https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/hrpc>.
Archives of the list can be found at
<https://www.irtf.org/mail-archive/web/hrpc/current/index.html>.
10. Informative References
[Ababil] Danchev, D., "Dissecting 'Operation Ababil' - an OSINT
Analysis", September 2012, <http://ddanchev.blogspot.be/
2012/09/dissecting-operation-ababil-osint.html>.
[Abbate] Abbate, J., "Inventing the Internet", MIT Press, 2000,
<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/inventing-internet>.
[Adrian] Adrian, D., Bhargavan, K., Durumeric, Z., Gaudry, P.,
Green, M., Halderman, J., Heninger, N., Springall, D.,
Thome, E., Valenta, L., VanderSloot, B., Wustrow, E.,
Zanella-Beguelin, S., and P. Zimmermann, "Imperfect
Forward Secrecy: How Diffie-Hellman Fails in Practice",
Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer
and Communications Security, pp. 5-17,
DOI 10.1145/2810103.2813707, October 2015.
[Alshalan-etal]
Alshalan, A., Pisharody, S., and D. Huang, "A Survey of
Mobile VPN Technologies", IEEE Communications Surveys &
Tutorials, Volume 18, Issue 2, pp. 1177-1196,
DOI 10.1109/COMST.2015.2496624, 2016,
<http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/
document/7314859/?arnumber=7314859>.
[APIP] Naylor, D., Mukerjee, M., and P. Steenkiste, "Balancing
accountability and privacy in the network", SIGCOMM '14,
Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Conference on
SIGCOMM, pp. 75-86, DOI 10.1145/2740070.2626306,
October 2014,
<https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2626306>.
[Appelbaum]
Appelbaum, J., Gibson, A., Goetz, J., Kabisch, V., Kampf,
L., and L. Ryge, "NSA targets the privacy-conscious",
2014, <http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/aktuell/
nsa230_page-1.html>.
[ars] Anderson, N., "P2P researchers: use a blocklist or you
will be tracked... 100% of the time", October 2007,
<http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/10/
p2p-researchers-use-a-blocklist-or-you-will-be-tracked-
100-of-the-time/>.
[Aryan-etal]
Aryan, S., Aryan, H., and J. Alex Halderman, "Internet
Censorship in Iran: A First Look", 2013,
<https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/iran-foci13.pdf>.
[Babbie] Babbie, E., "The Basics of Social Research",
Cengage, Belmont, CA, 2017.
[BBC-wikileaks]
BBC, "Whistle-blower site taken offline", February 2008,
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7250916.stm>.
[BCP72] Rescorla, E. and B. Korver, "Guidelines for Writing RFC
Text on Security Considerations", BCP 72, RFC 3552,
July 2003, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/bcp72>.
[Benkler] Benkler, Y., "The Wealth of Networks - How Social
Production Transforms Markets and Freedom", Yale
University Press, New Haven and London, 2006,
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Layer", CCS '15, Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC
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Version 2.0 ('Codev2')", Basic Books, New York, 2006,
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D., McKune, S., Rey, A., Scott-Railton, J., Deibert, R.,
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[Marquis-Boire]
Marquis-Boire, M., "Schrodinger's Cat Video and the Death
of Clear-Text", August 2014, <https://citizenlab.org/
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[Meyer] Meyer, J., "Defining and Evaluating Resilience: A
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[Musiani] Musiani, F., "Giants, Dwarfs and Decentralized
Alternatives to Internet-based Services: An Issue of
Internet Governance", Westminster Papers in Communication
and Culture, 10(1), pp. 81-94, DOI 10.16997/wpcc.214,
2015, <https://www.westminsterpapers.org/
articles/10.16997/wpcc.214/>.
[Namecoin] Namecoin, "Namecoin", 2015, <https://namecoin.info/>.
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Residential Broadband networks", PAM: International
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NATusage11.pdf>.
[NETmundial]
NETmundial, "NETmundial Multistakeholder Statement",
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[Newegg] Mullin, J., "Newegg on trial: Mystery company TQP rewrites
the history of encryption", November 2013,
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trial-mystery-company-tqp-re-writes-the-history-of-
encryption/>.
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[Penney] Penney, J., "Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and
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papers.cfm?abstract_id=2769645>.
[Peterson] Peterson, A., Gellman, B., and A. Soltani, "Yahoo to make
SSL encryption the default for Webmail users. Finally.",
October 2013, <https://www.washingtonpost.com/
news/the-switch/wp/2013/10/14/
yahoo-to-make-ssl-encryption-the-default-
for-webmail-users-finally/?utm_term=.a17eca45ddfe>.
[PETS2015VPN]
Perta, V., Barbera, M., Tyson, G., Haddadi, H., and A.
Mei, "A Glance through the VPN Looking Glass: IPv6 Leakage
and DNS Hijacking in Commercial VPN clients",
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PETS2015VPN.pdf>.
[Pidgin] js and Pidgin Developers, "[XMPP] Invisible mode violating
standard", 2007,
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scenarios", Work in Progress, draft-pouwelse-censorfree-
scenarios-02, October 2012.
[Rachovitsa]
Rachovitsa, A., "Engineering and lawyering privacy by
design: understanding online privacy both as a technical
and an international human rights issue", International
Journal of Law and Information Technology, Volume 24,
Issue 4, pp. 374-399, DOI 10.1093/ijlit/eaw012,
December 2016, <https://academic.oup.com/ijlit/
article/24/4/374/2566975/
Engineering-and-lawyering-privacy-by-design>.
[RFC760] Postel, J., "DoD standard Internet Protocol", RFC 760,
DOI 10.17487/RFC0760, January 1980,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc760>.
[RFC791] Postel, J., "Internet Protocol", STD 5, RFC 791,
DOI 10.17487/RFC0791, September 1981,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc791>.
[RFC793] Postel, J., "Transmission Control Protocol", STD 7,
RFC 793, DOI 10.17487/RFC0793, September 1981,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc793>.
[RFC894] Hornig, C., "A Standard for the Transmission of IP
Datagrams over Ethernet Networks", STD 41, RFC 894,
DOI 10.17487/RFC0894, April 1984,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc894>.
[RFC1035] Mockapetris, P., "Domain names - implementation and
specification", STD 13, RFC 1035, DOI 10.17487/RFC1035,
November 1987, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1035>.
[RFC1122] Braden, R., Ed., "Requirements for Internet Hosts -
Communication Layers", STD 3, RFC 1122,
DOI 10.17487/RFC1122, October 1989,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1122>.
[RFC1958] Carpenter, B., Ed., "Architectural Principles of the
Internet", RFC 1958, DOI 10.17487/RFC1958, June 1996,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1958>.
[RFC1984] IAB and IESG, "IAB and IESG Statement on Cryptographic
Technology and the Internet", BCP 200, RFC 1984,
DOI 10.17487/RFC1984, August 1996,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1984>.
[RFC2026] Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards Process --
Revision 3", BCP 9, RFC 2026, DOI 10.17487/RFC2026,
October 1996, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2026>.
[RFC2277] Alvestrand, H., "IETF Policy on Character Sets and
Languages", BCP 18, RFC 2277, DOI 10.17487/RFC2277,
January 1998, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2277>.
[RFC2775] Carpenter, B., "Internet Transparency", RFC 2775,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2775, February 2000,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2775>.
[RFC3022] Srisuresh, P. and K. Egevang, "Traditional IP Network
Address Translator (Traditional NAT)", RFC 3022,
DOI 10.17487/RFC3022, January 2001,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3022>.
[RFC3365] Schiller, J., "Strong Security Requirements for Internet
Engineering Task Force Standard Protocols", BCP 61,
RFC 3365, DOI 10.17487/RFC3365, August 2002,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3365>.
[RFC3439] Bush, R. and D. Meyer, "Some Internet Architectural
Guidelines and Philosophy", RFC 3439,
DOI 10.17487/RFC3439, December 2002,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3439>.
[RFC3536] Hoffman, P., "Terminology Used in Internationalization in
the IETF", RFC 3536, DOI 10.17487/RFC3536, May 2003,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3536>.
[RFC3724] Kempf, J., Ed., Austein, R., Ed., and IAB, "The Rise of
the Middle and the Future of End-to-End: Reflections on
the Evolution of the Internet Architecture", RFC 3724,
DOI 10.17487/RFC3724, March 2004,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3724>.
[RFC3935] Alvestrand, H., "A Mission Statement for the IETF",
BCP 95, RFC 3935, DOI 10.17487/RFC3935, October 2004,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3935>.
[RFC4033] Arends, R., Austein, R., Larson, M., Massey, D., and S.
Rose, "DNS Security Introduction and Requirements",
RFC 4033, DOI 10.17487/RFC4033, March 2005,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4033>.
[RFC4084] Klensin, J., "Terminology for Describing Internet
Connectivity", BCP 104, RFC 4084, DOI 10.17487/RFC4084,
May 2005, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4084>.
[RFC4101] Rescorla, E. and IAB, "Writing Protocol Models", RFC 4101,
DOI 10.17487/RFC4101, June 2005,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4101>.
[RFC4941] Narten, T., Draves, R., and S. Krishnan, "Privacy
Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in
IPv6", RFC 4941, DOI 10.17487/RFC4941, September 2007,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4941>.
[RFC4949] Shirey, R., "Internet Security Glossary, Version 2",
FYI 36, RFC 4949, DOI 10.17487/RFC4949, August 2007,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4949>.
[RFC5246] Dierks, T. and E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security
(TLS) Protocol Version 1.2", RFC 5246,
DOI 10.17487/RFC5246, August 2008,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5246>.
[RFC5321] Klensin, J., "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", RFC 5321,
DOI 10.17487/RFC5321, October 2008,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5321>.
[RFC5646] Phillips, A., Ed., and M. Davis, Ed., "Tags for
Identifying Languages", BCP 47, RFC 5646,
DOI 10.17487/RFC5646, September 2009,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5646>.
[RFC5694] Camarillo, G., Ed., and IAB, "Peer-to-Peer (P2P)
Architecture: Definition, Taxonomies, Examples, and
Applicability", RFC 5694, DOI 10.17487/RFC5694,
November 2009, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5694>.
[RFC5944] Perkins, C., Ed., "IP Mobility Support for IPv4, Revised",
RFC 5944, DOI 10.17487/RFC5944, November 2010,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5944>.
[RFC6101] Freier, A., Karlton, P., and P. Kocher, "The Secure
Sockets Layer (SSL) Protocol Version 3.0", RFC 6101,
DOI 10.17487/RFC6101, August 2011,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6101>.
[RFC6108] Chung, C., Kasyanov, A., Livingood, J., Mody, N., and B.
Van Lieu, "Comcast's Web Notification System Design",
RFC 6108, DOI 10.17487/RFC6108, February 2011,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6108>.
[RFC6120] Saint-Andre, P., "Extensible Messaging and Presence
Protocol (XMPP): Core", RFC 6120, DOI 10.17487/RFC6120,
March 2011, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6120>.
[RFC6365] Hoffman, P. and J. Klensin, "Terminology Used in
Internationalization in the IETF", BCP 166, RFC 6365,
DOI 10.17487/RFC6365, September 2011,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6365>.
[RFC6698] Hoffman, P. and J. Schlyter, "The DNS-Based Authentication
of Named Entities (DANE) Transport Layer Security (TLS)
Protocol: TLSA", RFC 6698, DOI 10.17487/RFC6698,
August 2012, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6698>.
[RFC6701] Farrel, A. and P. Resnick, "Sanctions Available for
Application to Violators of IETF IPR Policy", RFC 6701,
DOI 10.17487/RFC6701, August 2012,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6701>.
[RFC6797] Hodges, J., Jackson, C., and A. Barth, "HTTP Strict
Transport Security (HSTS)", RFC 6797,
DOI 10.17487/RFC6797, November 2012,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6797>.
[RFC6973] Cooper, A., Tschofenig, H., Aboba, B., Peterson, J.,
Morris, J., Hansen, M., and R. Smith, "Privacy
Considerations for Internet Protocols", RFC 6973,
DOI 10.17487/RFC6973, July 2013,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6973>.
[RFC7230] Fielding, R., Ed., and J. Reschke, Ed., "Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Message Syntax and Routing",
RFC 7230, DOI 10.17487/RFC7230, June 2014,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7230>.
[RFC7231] Fielding, R., Ed., and J. Reschke, Ed., "Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content",
RFC 7231, DOI 10.17487/RFC7231, June 2014,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7231>.
[RFC7232] Fielding, R., Ed., and J. Reschke, Ed., "Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Conditional Requests",
RFC 7232, DOI 10.17487/RFC7232, June 2014,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7232>.
[RFC7233] Fielding, R., Ed., Lafon, Y., Ed., and J. Reschke, Ed.,
"Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Range Requests",
RFC 7233, DOI 10.17487/RFC7233, June 2014,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7233>.
[RFC7234] Fielding, R., Ed., Nottingham, M., Ed., and J. Reschke,
Ed., "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Caching",
RFC 7234, DOI 10.17487/RFC7234, June 2014,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7234>.
[RFC7235] Fielding, R., Ed., and J. Reschke, Ed., "Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Authentication", RFC 7235,
DOI 10.17487/RFC7235, June 2014,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7235>.
[RFC7236] Reschke, J., "Initial Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
Authentication Scheme Registrations", RFC 7236,
DOI 10.17487/RFC7236, June 2014,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7236>.
[RFC7237] Reschke, J., "Initial Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
Method Registrations", RFC 7237, DOI 10.17487/RFC7237,
June 2014, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7237>.
[RFC7258] Farrell, S. and H. Tschofenig, "Pervasive Monitoring Is an
Attack", BCP 188, RFC 7258, DOI 10.17487/RFC7258,
May 2014, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7258>.
[RFC7469] Evans, C., Palmer, C., and R. Sleevi, "Public Key Pinning
Extension for HTTP", RFC 7469, DOI 10.17487/RFC7469,
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[RFC7540] Belshe, M., Peon, R., and M. Thomson, Ed., "Hypertext
Transfer Protocol Version 2 (HTTP/2)", RFC 7540,
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[RFC7574] Bakker, A., Petrocco, R., and V. Grishchenko, "Peer-to-
Peer Streaming Peer Protocol (PPSPP)", RFC 7574,
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[RFC7624] Barnes, R., Schneier, B., Jennings, C., Hardie, T.,
Trammell, B., Huitema, C., and D. Borkmann,
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Acknowledgements
A special thanks to all members of the HRPC Research Group who
contributed to this document. The following deserve a special
mention:
- Joana Varon for helping draft the first iteration of the
methodology and previous drafts, and for directing the film "Net
of Rights" and working on the interviews at IETF 92 in Dallas.
- Daniel Kahn Gillmor (dkg) for helping with the first iteration of
the glossary (Section 2) as well as a lot of technical guidance,
support, and language suggestions.
- Claudio Guarnieri for writing the first iterations of the case
studies on VPNs, HTTP, and P2P.
- Will Scott for writing the first iterations of the case studies on
DNS, IP, and XMPP.
- Avri Doria for proposing writing a glossary in the first place,
help with writing the initial proposals and Internet-Drafts, her
reviews, and her contributions to the glossary.
Thanks also to Stephane Bortzmeyer, John Curran, Barry Shein, Joe
Hall, Joss Wright, Harry Halpin, and Tim Sammut, who made a lot of
excellent suggestions, many of which found their way directly into
the text. We want to thank Amelia Andersdotter, Stephen Farrell,
Stephane Bortzmeyer, Shane Kerr, Giovane Moura, James Gannon, Alissa
Cooper, Andrew Sullivan, S. Moonesamy, Roland Bless, and Scott Craig
for their reviews and for testing the HRPC guidelines in the wild.
We would also like to thank Molly Sauter, Arturo Filasto, Nathalie
Marechal, Eleanor Saitta, Richard Hill, and all others who provided
input on this document or the conceptualization of the idea. Thanks
to Edward Snowden for his comments at IETF 93 in Prague regarding the
impact of protocols on the rights of users.
Authors' Addresses
Niels ten Oever
ARTICLE 19
Email: mail@nielstenoever.net
Corinne Cath
Oxford Internet Institute
Email: corinnecath@gmail.com