Surveillance and Internet Identity

Last week I attended IIW 17, the 17th meeting of the Internet Identity Workshop, which is held twice a year in Mountain View, California. As usual it was a great opportunity to exchange ideas and meet people, with its unconference format, its many sessions, its rotating demos, its wide space for discussions, and its two free dinners with free drinks.

For me, however, it was tinged with sadness, because of what has happened since the first IIW I attended, IIW 12, in May 2011. IIW 12 was the first IIW after the launch of NSTIC. IIW 17 was the first IIW after Snowden.

The NSTIC Strategy Document, released in April 2011 with a preface signed by President Obama, repeatedly emphasized the goal of enhancing privacy as a key element of the “vision” and “guiding principles” of NSTIC. The document explicitly stated that the Identity Ecosystem will use privacy-enhancing technology and policies to inhibit the ability of service providers to link an individual’s transactions, thus ensuring that no one service provider can gain a complete picture of an individual’s life in cyberspace. At the time, Facebook Connect was threatening to inject Facebook as a middleman in all or most Internet activities, and I was happy to see that the US Government seemingly wanted to prevent such a massive invasion of privacy; I even convened a session at IIW 12 proposing a technique for achieving the privacy goals of NSTIC in the short term. Little did I know that the government was busy building a massive surveillance apparatus that would give the government a complete picture of an individual’s life in cyberspace, by means including bulk collection of data from service providers.

The Internet, given to the world by the US Department of Defense, was a world-wide forum for free-flowing, spontaneous exchange of ideas. Now the NSA, part of the same Department of Defense, has taken that away. People know that they are being tracked and identified when they post an anonymous comment. People know that their conversations are being recorded. Therefore people must think twice about they say.

I don’t know if Congress will be able to rein in the NSA. It should be clear that spying on US citizens is unconstitutional, but some politicians think that it is the NSA’s job to spy on everybody else in the planet. They don’t seem to consider or care that, if the US Government insists on a God-given right to spy on everybody else, other countries or regions may develop their own national or regional networks, separated from the US Internet by an air gap.

Fortunately, the technical community has reacted strongly against the NSA’s attacks on Internet privacy. And thanks to Snowden’s revelations, many of the attack techniques are known. It may therefore be possible to protect Internet privacy by technical means.

Coming back to the subject of the workshop, Internet Identity, I would argue that the first thing to do to protect Internet privacy is to get rid of the pernicious technology variously known as third-party login, social login or federated login. To be precise, I am referring to authentication techniques where the user authenticates to a third-party identity provider, which then provides identity and/or attribute information to a relying party, using a protocol such as OAuth or OpenID Connect. (These are the techniques in Group 2 of the taxonomy proposed in the paper Privacy Postures of Authentication Technologies.)

The only intrinsic advantage of federated login is that it allows the identity provider to collect vast amounts of information about the user, since the identity provider learns not only the user’s identity and/or attributes, but also what relying parties the user logs in to. The identity provider uses the information to sell ads that target the user accurately. We now know that the information is also shared with the government, which makes it available to thousands of analysts and IT personnel who use it for legal or illegal government or personal purposes.

There are no other intrinsic advantages to federated login.

The government and the identity providers argue that federated login is more secure than direct authentication to the relying party with username and password, but the opposite is true.

Security is supposedly increased because federated login reduces password reuse. But password reuse will not be substantially reduced unless a large majority of world-wide web sites force their users to use federated login with one of a small number of global identity providers such as Google or Facebook, something that will hopefully not come to pass.

Security is also supposedly increased because a large identity provider supposedly does a better job of protecting the user’s password. But I don’t know why a large identity provider would provide better protection against hackers, since large companies are not known to provide great security. And I do know that a password entrusted to a large identity provider may become available to thousands of employees of the government, of government contractors, and of the identity provider.. And the capture of a password used at an identity provider, which provides access to multiple web sites, is more damaging to the user than the capture of a password used at a single web site.

There is an alternative to authenticating to a web site with username and password that provides both security and privacy: namely, authentication with a cryptographic key pair automatically generated on the user’s machine when the user registers with the site. The site stores the hash of the public key component of the key pair in its database, and uses it to locate the user’s account when the user visits the site again and demonstrates knowledge of the private key component.

Another claimed advantage of federated login is that the user can register at a new site with a single click if logged in to the identity provider, any personal data required by the site being provided by the identity provider. This is a real advantage, but not an intrinsic one. The same benefit could be easily obtained by storing the personal data in the browser, and specifying a protocol by which the browser would supply selected personal data items to a web site upon demand by the site and approval by the user. Such a protocol would be much simpler than any of the federated login protocols and would provide more security and more privacy.

Yet another claimed advantage of federated login is that the identity provider could provide the relying party with a user’s identity and/or attributes verified by an identity proofing procedure; however, such verified identity and/or attributes could equally well be provided by a certificate authority using a public key certificate (or by multiple authorities providing a combination of a certificate binding a public key to an identity and one or more certificates binding the identity to various attributes), without the certificate authority having to be informed of what relying parties the certificate is submitted to.

It is sometimes argued (cf. the NSTIC 101 session at last week’s IIW) that using public key cryptography for authentication would be expensive and would require the user to carry a separate dongle or smartcard for every credential. This is not true. There is no need for special hardware to store a cryptographic credential, and if special hardware is desired for some reason, there is no need to use different pieces of hardware for different credentials.

Two sessions at IIW 17 gave me hope that Internet privacy is not a lost cause.

One of them was convened by Tim Bray of Google to report on the comments he received in response to a blog post arguing to developers that they should use federated login rather than login with username and password. The comments, which he referred to as a “bloodbath,” showed that neither developers nor end-users like federated login. I hope that such pushback will eventually force companies like Google to give up on federated login.

The other one was convened by Kazue Sako of NEC to discuss anonymous credentials and their possible uses. The room was overflowing and the level of engagement of the audience was high, showing that technical people are interested in privacy-enhancing authentication technologies even if large companies are not.