P2P Darknets to eclipse bandwidth management?

Fri Sep 2 12:43:03 UTC 2005

* Stephen J. Wilcox:

> packet inspection will just evolve, thats the nature of this
> problem.. there are things you can find out from encrypted flows -
> what the endpoints and ports are, who the CA is. then you can look
> at the characteristics of the data.

These protocols typically don't use a PKI.  You could look at public
keys, but you don't even have to distribute them in-band.

What you can do is look at packet sizes and do timing analysis on
incoming and outgoing packets to a particular hosts.  For example, it
is possible to use such techniques to detect an interactive SSH
connection to a particular host on your network which is used by an
attacker to control an SSH client which connects to some other host.
I don't know how this scales to tens of thousands of hosts, though.

Apart from that, I do not really understand the concept of "bandwidth
management".  Isn't this this just an euphemism for "content
management", to avoid the ugly "c" word?