Cloud & Telecom Security

Here is coming an eye-catching blog at VoIP security at VoIPsa Blog.

See comment at Register, named "Net Neutrality bid gone for good" by Andrew.  A bunch of Internet giants expressed their discontent to Net Neutrality, for its mistiness and injustice. Andrew is hoping a "more coherent and professional fashion", and even "with better branding". The key point in my brain, for its possible recoming, is the benefit balance between transmission network (typically those tradional telcos) operators and CP/SPs. The latter would not like to let the former "tame" the Internet, but "foster".  

See the story by Andrew…. Read more…

FT.com reports that “Skype says texts are censored by China” by Alison Maitland. It’s incredible, both from technical and political aspects. I do believe it’s a distorted story by western reporters. Every skypers can testify the lie and absurdness. It betrays the fact that the scepticism and bias to China are expanded from VoIP to text chat. See what he said at the below:

Skype, the fast-growing internet communications company that belongs to Ebay, has admitted that its partner in China has filtered text messages, defending this compliance with censorship laws as the only way to do business in the country. In a Financial Times interview, Niklas Zennström, Skype’s chief executive, responded to accusations that the company had censored text messages containing words like “Falun Gong” – a banned movement – and “Dalai Lama”. He said that Tom Online, its joint venture partner in China, was complying with local law.

“Tom had implemented a text filter, which is what everyone else in that market is doing,” said Mr Zennström. “Those are the regulations.”

He claimed that compliance with Chinese censorship was no different from obeying rules governing business in western countries. China, along with the US and Germany, is one of Skype’s three biggest markets in terms of active users of its free telephony service, which routes encrypted calls between computers via the internet.

Entering the controversy that has seen Yahoo, Google and Microsoft heavily criticised for working with China’s censorship rules, Mr Zennström said: “I may like or not like the laws and regulations to operate businesses in the UK or Germany or the US, but if I do business there I choose to comply with those laws and regulations. I can try to lobby to change them, but I need to comply with them. China in that way is not different.”

[Tags]Skype,China[/Tags]

There are pungent comments, criticism, satire, etc to those ISPs and telecom operators on their blocking, filtering and even passive attitude to P2P, from all over the internet. However, from the stand of ISPs, they have a lot of broken-hearted story to tell to their subscribers, shareholders, and those regulatory authorities. It seems that the earth has been divided into two camps: one is P2P pros, one is the P2P cons. But who is the judge ?

See an absorbing discussion named ISP Rise Against P2P Users at slashdot.org. The below is some excerpt…

bananaendian writes “Spencer Kelly from BBC’s Click program writes about the emerging backslash against high bandwidth P2P users. Apparently it has been estimates that up to one third of internet’s traffic is caused by BitTorrent file-sharing program. Especially ISPs who are leasing their bandwidth by the megabyte are more inclined to resort to ‘shaping your traffic’ by throttling ports, setting bandwidth limits or even classifying accounts according services used. What is your ISPs policy regarding P2P and is it fair for them to put restrictions and conditions on its use.”

ISP: Backslash
P2P: Forward slash. Riposte.
ISP: Touche. QOS Packet Filtering!
P2P. Lunge. Encryption!
ISP: En guard. Subpoena compliance.
P2P: Aahaaah! Ubiquitous Mesh Networks.
ISP: Arrrgh! [dies].

Where is BadAnalogyGuy when you need him?
–
Hello, Dad? I’m in jail.

[tags]Telecom,P2P,Voip[/Tags]

The first lawsuit on copyrights infringing by P2P software at mainland, China, was reported yesterday.

Kuro is a web site company providing music share services with their P2P based software. According to its website logo, it provides downloading and sharing of more than half a million MP3 pop songs and other music, using a software named Kuro, which is reported to be developed by a Taiwan software company.

A music and culture company at Shanghai, Busheng, claimed that Kuro illegally spreads up to 59 songs, owned by them, without any payment and even notification.

P2P is a sort of excellent technical model to allow mass file downloading and sharing. The number of P2P based applications is keep a rocket growth, along with strong law dissention. A couple of countries are legislating to regulate the development and application of P2P sharing and downloading. In greater China region, first law suit on BT (the most famous file sharing software based P2P) was reported at HongKong at last year, where the defendants were sentenced guilty and put into prison for 3 months.

Although the P2P sharing companies are often harassed by legal issues, but nobody would like to overlook their potentials to impact the Internet. A recent acquisition report of VeryCD by Google betrayed the background business value of such P2P sharing platforms. VeryCD is the central government of the new-rich P2P sharing platform – eMule, where you can find numerous movies, songs, books, and other electronic media, sharing by those millions of eMulers.

There are flooding IM clients waiting for your choice, isn’t it? But which one do you like? which one fit your interests the best? I believe you must not have time to review them on by one. In fact, even if you have time, you just won’t like to do that.

IM Watch is doing that for you. It lists out and reviews almost each one you have heard of, (except the most popular one at China – QQ of Tecent,) covering Gtalk, Skype, GAIM, AIM, Unyte, Gizmo Project, Chatzilla, Psi, PhoneGaim, Yahoo Messenger, …..

For a more comprehansive collection of various IM clients, see Betanews.

IT and security managers are paying more and more attention to those threats introduced by the blooming IM and P2P applications. The demands pump the growth of IM/P2P security market. The acquisition of IMLogic by Symantec bolstered the morale of vendors and VC in this area. The independent biggest boy – Facetime is striving to make their bigger fortune by release of their newest version of IMAuditor Enterprise Edition 7.0.

It’s a “Comprehensive Solution for Managing Inbound Threats, Information Leakage and Regulatory Compliance”, with “broader support for IM including Skype 2.0, WebEx support for logging and archival of chat sessions within a web meeting, and enhanced reporting for multiple public and enterprise instant messaging solutions including Microsoft Live Communications Server, IBM Lotus SameTime, Reuters, Parlano, and Jabber.” remarked at marketwatch. See the following feature changes at IMAuditor 7.0:

• – Administrator Dashboards — Role-based dashboards in IMAuditor 7 provide a snapshot of key traffic and configuration information to administrators and reviewers, allowing them to monitor operationsand easily drill down for further details.
• – Enhanced Visibility and Reporting — Enables organizations more detailed visibility with several new security reports for SpIM, Day Zero URL blocking and Restricted Phrase filters. Allows creation of customer reports in either table or chart formats, and also enables scheduled delivery of reports in HTML and .PDF formats.
• - New User Interface (UI) — All Enterprise Edition components now share a consistent UI with special emphasis on usability and ease of navigation. The user interface has been designed to anticipate common user actions and provide logical groups of related operations to help administrators accomplish their tasks more effectively and in less time.
• – WebEx Support — Ensures compliance by logging and archiving integrated WebEx chat sessions using existing messaging archiving solutions.
• – Skype 2.0 and QQ Support — Utilizes behavioral-based detections of session behavior and other attributes to allow enterprises to control and enforce policy on the latest versions of Skype and QQ communications. — Anti-virus Scanning — Adds support for Computer Associates eTrust to the list of supported third-party products for virus scanning of IM-based file attachments.

See detailed product description at Facetime.com.

It’s very impressive to find Skype2.0 and QQ in its support list. Skype is the most toughest P2P application to detect and control, while QQ is the most popular IM application in China.

“There will be more and more of these (greynet) applications coming on to the market, while other IM networks such as Yahoo were starting to add Skype-like features to avoid detection.” TechWorld reported.

“The adoption of instant messaging applications and their rapid convergence with P2P, VoIP, and Web conferencing technologies can expose organisations to significant business risks,” agreed Robert Mahowald of IDC.

The attitude of those telco companies towards new P2P applications is very sensitive and abuzz, not only those two fix line telecom operators in China, but also other telecom giants, such as AT&T, Verizon and Qwest are pondering and evaluating what the P2P will bring to their networks. See the following article from LightReading.

RBOCs Wait & See on P2P

AT&T Inc.(NYSE:T-messageboard), Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ-messageboard), and Qwest Communications International Inc. (NYSE: Q – messageboard) don’t have hard, fast policies in place to deal with consumerpeer-to-peer traffic. Despite the hype about P2P traffic volumes on carrier networks, these phone companies say they're fine to watch and wait for now.

One network operator CTO is even skeptical that P2P really causes as much congestion in networks as has been hyped. (See P2P Fuels Global Bandwidth Binge.)

In separate conversations with leading technology executives from three of the four largest carriers in the U.S., Light Reading has learned that even while the industry is abuzz over P2P traffic, the big boys don't see it as stopping up their networks… yet. They are, however, quick to draw a distinctionbetween their proposed TV services and the other stuff that traverses the open Internet.

"I think the view that we're looking at is: You have managed services and you have unmanaged services," says Chris Rice, AT&T's executive VP of network planning and engineering. "Peer-to-peer services are unmanaged." Read more…

There was a report on “VoIP in China” at TMCnet.com and Theregister retailed it yesterday. VoIP technology is a revolution brought by the IP prevalence. It lowers the operation costs of both the carriers and the consumers. See my previous post on “Skype blocked at China“, where I expressed my points on the way in China for Skype and other web phones.

In fact, the revenue growth of those two fix line operators (China Telecom and China Netcom) depends on their broad-band internet access and some of the value-added services. But the growth of such two kind of services can not fill the revenue hole by voice revenue decline. Especially when the leading mobile operator – China Mobile claimed a few days ago that they would by far lower their roaming and inbound call price. That’s a hard time for CTG and CNC, hurted by the “replacing consumption”. The contribution of their PHS products is just to collect money by burning more money.

At 2007, the main four operators will get their own 3G licenses. And the consolidation and upgrade of their BSS/OSS systems will be reaching a milestone to support more multiple-play products. It’s a critical point for CTG and CNC, who have huge scale local communication networks. Theoretically they will have a fair competition base.

Currently there are a drastic argument at engadget.com, arose by a post on “China gives VoIP two year sentence”. I agree and appreciate the comments from Terence and LG and etc. China never ban Skype, never claim Skype illegal. People can use Skype just as other part of the world. China just doesn’t want to grant such a license to permit INTERCONNECT with PSTN. That’s the right of a government to decide when and how to grant such licenses, no business with the socialism and politics. Read more…

At recent Blackhat Europe, Philippe BIONDI and Fabrice DESCLAUX published their latest investigation on Skype titiled “Silver Needle in the Skype“. Previously a test by Network World studied the cryptography algorithm underneath Skype and drew a conclusion that Skype is security enough for end users.  Another whitepaper by Tom Berson expressed the similar viewpoint.  But, with heavy reverse engineering of Skype, Philippe and Fabrice investigated deeply how Skype operates and exchange information. The following is their conclusion:

Good points
      Skype was made by clever people
      Good use of cryptography
Bad points
      Hard to enforce a security policy with Skype
      Jams traffic, can’t be distinguished from data exfiltration
      Incompatible with traffic monitoring, IDS
      Impossible to protect from attacks (which would be obfuscated)
      Total blackbox. Lack of transparency.
      No way to know if there is/will be a backdoor
      Fully trusts anyone who speaks Skype.

I agree mostly to the author by my Top Ten Concern to Skype Security.

有句成语“成也萧何，败也萧何”，讲的是成事因萧何而成，败事也因萧何而败。有月下萧何追韩信的佳话，成就了汉家四百年江山，但是也因为对萧何的信任，也让运筹帷幄、叱咤风云的大将军束手就戮，屈死乱刀倒下。虽说前有彭越、英布的故事，但是，如果不是因为萧何，韩信不会轻易被杀。

萧何和BT有什么瓜葛吗？有！BT就是电信运营商业务发展的“萧何”。

以老大BT为代表的P2P宽带下载成就了固网运营商风风火火的ADSL装机热潮，拉动固网业务增长的两位数百分比。同时，华为、阿尔卡特、港湾、UT、中兴等也赚得眉开眼笑。想看电影吗？盗版盘多不方便，可能还读不出来，下载，各种清晰度的都有，什么片子都有。国内版权控制的失位、以及VCD/DVD红火多年背后的消费习惯对此贡献良多。120元包月下来，干什么？上网查论文吗？MSN/QQ聊天？所以，不能否认，BT们在月下给运营商们拉来了白花花的银子。

另外一面，城域网和骨干网怎么扩容也跟不上带宽需求的火箭上升速度，“带宽扩容增加是线性的，BT消耗带宽是指数增加的”，所以，永远也跟不上。这种担忧深深地萦绕在管理者和一些决策者地脑海里。于是出现了众多将BT们“一封了之”的声音，似乎只有那样，才能保证宽带网络的健康发展。

看了前面一段“成也萧何”，我们清醒地知道，封是封不得的。于是广东电信推出流量计费，打破了多年的宽带按时计费、包月计费的传统。另外，内容计费随着3G的到来成为热门的Buzz word。流量管理和内容管理成为打破BT威胁的另一出路。

运营商受到最大的威胁其实不是BT，因为毕竟你可以扩容，客户还是你的，该打的电话照打，多出来包月的120元价格可是大大高于现在固网运营商的平均ARPU。

最大的威胁来自于Skype们，它会直接杀向运营商当前收入的主体，抢夺运营商钱包里的钞票,并且对流量计费免疫。国内、国际上沸沸扬扬的Skype现象、封堵Skype引起的争议、国内民间和运营商两种声音的对抗其实才应该是媒体关注的“最强”。

时间如白马过隙，匆匆忙忙中2005年就结束了，现在2006年的时针转的似乎比去年更快。有朋友提醒说总该回首一下、前瞻一下，拖了一段时间，总算写下几段文字，也算对自己和朋友有个交代。

2005年不能算是安全市场的丰收年，写下战国七雄的文字后，未料到其中已有玩家遭遇“宏智”-like的不幸，我自认不是乌鸦嘴，这事肯定与我无关，-:(

还是看看后面的技术发展吧。我借用了Gartner公司的新技术发展曲线，将若干我想到的安全技术都拎出来，给他们找了个位置。欢迎大家批评、评论。

请看： Read more…

博客之外有播客 – 昨日Ruby-based PodCatcher release 1.3.1发布。Podcatcher是一款用于播客Podcast的命令行界面的客户端，它使用Ruby语言开发，

• 提供多种下载策略，
• 支持BT – BitTorrent协议(需要下载RubyTorrent)，
• 提供缓存Cache管理，
• 并且可以帮助生成MP3的播放表playlists.例如下面的命令行界面：
  podcatcher -d ~/podcasts http://podcastalley.com/PodcastAlleyTop50.opml > latest.m3u

它告诉了我们:

• Ruby的流行：Ruby作为一种面向对象的解释性语言正在展示其开发优势，并且正在积累越来越多的应用
• 博客之外的播客：除了木子美的播客之外，还有更多的多媒体博客Blog－播客PodCast正在更多的普及，乃至产生了这样的需求：自动抽取播客中的播放源并产生播放列表
• P2P技术及其应用逐渐成为基础平台：联想到前些天关于Firefox的P2P插件Allpeers的报导，浏览器和P2P的无缝结合很快就会成为一种缺省。远程协作和共享也直接推进着P2P的应用。
• 以及互联网上关于音频和视频的争夺愈演愈烈。Yahoo!收购互联网播放表Playlist共享公司WebJay也是一个证明。

另外，WinPodder也是新近发表的免费工具，它支持RSS订阅，帮助你订阅收听收看各种Audio/Video Podcast.

Skype has been providing us an transparent overlay network that can bypass firewalls and NATs. The most attractive point is its opening of its API, the Web2.0 style of interoperability. So numerous novel applications are invented at the SkypeNet. This time I was surprised by one “share” application named Unyte by webdialogs.com.

Unyte brings us Skype based remote desktop and netmeeting capability to “share documents, presentations, applications or even your entire desktop in real time with anyone, anywhere, anytime”. It help reflect the concept of virtual office and real-time remote collaboration. Though Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger is rolling out the similar features, Unyte will succeed in fighting for its living space with Skype base.

Read more…

据VoIPWiki Blog估计，当前【2006/1/4】的Skype注册用户数大约在7400万左右，每天的通话时长高达5000万分钟。并且用户数量还在以每个月600万的速度增长。但是作者估计在2006年Skype的增长速度将会放缓，主要是受到来自电信运营商、Vonage/CallVantage等VoIP运营商、GoogleTalk/MSN/Yahoo等基于IM的VoIP提供商等的竞争威胁影响。另外，像Gizmo这样的技术跟随者也会对Skype造成影响，甚至被成为Skype的杀手级应用。相信后面还会有更多的追随者、模仿者出现，而解决了互连互通问题后，剩下的比拼就是价格和服务质量了。