Saturday, May 22, 2010

DARPA Needs SAFER Internet - without DPI, with QoS


DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, published a funding opportunity for project SAFER - a "Safer Warfighter Communications".

The "program is to develop technology that will enable safe, resilient communications over the Internet, particularly in situations in which a third-party is attempting to discover the identity or location of the end users, or block the communication. The technology developed in the program will also provide the quality of service (QoS) required to support applications such as instant messaging, electronic mail, social networking, streaming video, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), video conferencing, and other media that promote effective communication."

DARPA, which was established in 1958 as a response to the soviet launching of Sputnik, is best known for building the ARPANET which led to the Internet we have today. It seems that DARPA is not so happy to see how their baby turned out to be, and they are seeking now "technologies that allow anonymous Internet communications to bypass techniques that suppress, localize, and/or corrupt information such as: 
  • Internet Protocol (IP)-address filtering or "blocking," typically by blacklisting the IP addresses of websites or other services, possibly by the network operator, to deny the user access
     
  • Domain Naming Service (DNS) hijacking, redirecting a user to a different website or service from what the user intended, by supplying a false reply to the user's domain name resolution request
     
  • Content filtering that captures and analyzes the content of the user's network traffic through deep packet inspection to check whether the traffic contains predefined signatures or sensitive keywords
SAFER is a 4-years, 4 phases project that is expected to start on Oct 1st, 2010.

More details - here and  here (RFP)


1 comment:

  1. Please get through to the ISPs and the UK government which are making it hard and soon impossible for me to find an ISP that does not do layer 7 filtering. I'm considering but don't at all want to resort to satelite. Even a business that can't or won't use homesafe still has their connection redirected through their guaranteed insecure Huawei hardware.

    P.s. Thanks DARPA for funding OpenBSD in it's early days even if the universities took most of the cash, it's great and they wouldn't dream of putting DPI in their firewall which now runs on Apple Macs and Blackberries

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