NSA Patents a Way To Spot Network Snoops

narramissic writes "The National Security Agency has patented a technique for figuring out whether someone is messing with your network by measuring the amount of time it takes to send different types of data and sounding an alert if something takes too long. 'The neat thing about this particular patent is that they look at the differences between the network layers,' said Tadayoshi Kohno, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Washington. But IOActive security researcher Dan Kaminsky wasn't so impressed: 'Think of it as — if your network gets a little slower, maybe a bad guy has physically inserted a device that is intercepting and retransmitting packets. Sure, that's possible. Or perhaps you're routing through a slower path for one of a billion reasons.'"

NSA patenting it because...

[ATestR]

They don't want any of US to have access to such technology when THEY slap the monitoring devices on our network.

Gov't patents

[Rinisari]

This is another example of the broken patent system. No government should be able to patent something--that technology was funded by the taxpayer and should thus be owned by the taxpayer, meaning that it is public and thus not patentable.

Re:Huh?

[internerdj]

Because they are going to drop all their other methods of intrusion detection for this? It seems like a reasonable cue for a warning for something that is difficult to pinpoint. Especially if that warning were to kick off an automated task that kicked off a more intensive search/monitoring process.

Re:Averages

[Dusty00]

Also newsworthy as the NSA is an organization with theoretically no commercial interest. So they're filing for a patent for what reason?

Re:NSA patenting it because...

[SatanicPuppy]

I was thinking the same thing...But in this world, it's more likely that they patented it so that some stupid patent troll won't get the opportunity to sue the gov't.

Re:Averages

[Anonymous Coward]

To have the work out there for the general public to read. Remember besides patents having protections for their inventor it also provides that the inventor publish their invention or breakthrough in public view. I suggest this is the easiest way to have this work in the public domain so to speak.

Re:Averages

[SatanicPuppy]

So, if you slip your monitoring gear in on day 1, the only way it would be detectable is if you took it off, and the packets started going faster.

Re:Gov't patents

[JCSoRocks]

I was actually confused by that when I first saw the headline. I didn't even know that the government could patent something. It's just so completely broken and silly that I never even considered it.

Comparing types

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not just measuring speed of network it is apparently measure differences in speeds of different network layers, or types of network traffic. Network congestion affects generally all types of packets the same. Snooping presumably may take longer to identify certain types of packets.
Oh and a passive tap will only work with certain protocols, it can't work (or not easily) with Gigabit ethernet for example.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

NSA secrets unveiled!

[PolygamousRanchKid]

How come I have the sneaky feeling, that if the NSA discovered anything really spectacular ... I wouldn't be reading about it on Slashdot?

"Cracking WPA2? No problem but it is patented by the NSA and documented by the USPTO" ... so you can read about it, but you have to license it from the NSA, if you want to use it.

That business model ought to work.

Re:Gov't patents

[astrodoom]

Once you pay the government, it stops becoming your money. You don't in any way own the road I drive on just because you pay your taxes. You may get some privileges to use it, but really, not even that. I mean, when they close the road I've never successfully gotten out of my car, showed them a 1099 tax form and forced them to let me drive on MY road...

Re:Averages

[Anonymous Coward]

However, if you do enough sampling over a period of time, you can make averages and see if some types/destinations of packets are possibly being messed with.

And at that point it is much too late and your data is already compromised. I mean, how much sampling would you need to be sure that the cause of the delay is snooping versus some clod bringing a hub into work.

Re:NSA patenting it because...

[gnick]

Two people/companies eventually coming to a solution that is sufficiently similar to violate patents is a long way from "obvious to someone who works in the field". And, assuming that the two people who identified the solution are the leaders in their field (because they reached the idea before the other 6.7 billion of us), they could be described as having "extraordinary skill in the art".

There are a number of patents for designs that multiple developers reached independently and were awarded to the person who managed to file first (Edison seemed to have extraordinary luck in beating his competitors to the patent office). That doesn't necessarily make the solution obvious, just non-unique.

I'm going to patent a snooping device...

[Geraden]

that randomly adds delay to each packet before rebroadcasting it...making it impossible to get a good bearing on the latency in the network once it's installed.