Exploiting KAD: Possible Uses and Misuses

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Exploiting KAD: Possible Uses and Misuses Exploiting KAD: Possible Uses and Misuses Moritz Steiner, Taoufik En-Najjary, and Ernst W. Biersack Institut Eurecom Sophia–Antipolis, France {steiner,ennajjar,erbi}@eurecom.fr This article is an editorial note submitted to CCR. It has NOT been peer reviewed. Authors take full responsibility for this article’s technical content. Comments can be posted through CCR Online. ABSTRACT [26] there are quite a few peers that do not follow this rule Kad ID Peer-to-peer systems have seen a tremendous growth in the and change their very frequently. last few years and peer-to-peer traffic makes a major frac- 1.1 Routing Lookup tion of the total traffic seen in the Internet. The dominating kad a application for peer-to-peer is file sharing. Some of the most Routing in is based on prefix matching: Node for- wards a query, destined to a node b, to the node in his rout- popular peer-to-peer systems for file sharing have been Nap- ing table that has the smallest XOR-distance. The XOR- ster, FastTrack, BitTorrent, and eDonkey, each one counting d a, b a b d a, b a ⊕ b a million or more users at their peak time. distance ( ) between nodes and is ( )= . kad It is calculated bitwise on the Kad IDsofthetwonodes, We got interested in , since it is the only DHT that a b d a, b has been part of very popular peer-to-peer system with sev- e.g. the distance between = 1011 and = 0111 is ( )= 1011 ⊕ 0111 = 1100. For details of the implementation see eral million simultaneous users. As we have been studying P kad [27]. The entries in the routing table of a peer point to over the course of the last 18 months we have been P P both, fascinated and frightened by the possibilities kad of- peers that are a various distances from : A peer stores kad only a few contacts to peers that are far away in the ID space fers. Mounting a Sybil attack is very easy in and allows P to compromise the privacy of kad users, to compromise the and increasingly more contacts to peers as we get closer . correct operation of the key lookup and to mount DDOS For details of the implementation see [27]. RoutingtoagivenKad ID is done in an iterative way. with very little resources. To improve robustness against node churn that can result in In this paper, we will relate some of our findings and point out how kad can be used and misused. stale routing table entries and to improve and look-up speed, the requesting peer P runs three parallel routing lookups for a given key at the same time: A peer P first consults his Categories and Subject Descriptors routing table to determine the three peers closest to the Kad H.3 [INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL]: ID. P sends route requests to these three peers, which Systems and Software – Distributed systems may or may not return to P route responses containing new peers even closer to the Kad ID, which are queried by General Terms P in the next step. The routing lookup terminates when the returned peers are further away from the Kad ID than the Algorithms, Security peer returning them. While iterative routing experiences a slightly higher delay Keywords than recursive routing, it offers increased robustness against kad Distributed Hash Table, Sybil attack, peer-to-peer system. message loss and it greatly simplifies crawling the net- work. In kad, a routing lookup will be performed in a first step by both, the publish and the search module. 1. INTRODUCTION TO KAD kad is a Kademlia-based [15] peer-to-peerDHT routing 1.2 Publishing and Searching protocol implemented by several peer-to-peerapplications such A key in a peer-to-peer system is an identifier used to as Overnet [18], eMule [11], and aMule [1]. The two open– retrieve information. In many peer-to-peer systems a key source projects eMule and aMule have the largest number of is typically published on a single peer that is numerically simultaneously connected users since these clients connect closest to that key. In kad,todealwithnodechurn,akey to the eDonkey network, which is a very popular peer-to- is published on ten different peers whose Kad ID agrees at peersystem for file sharing. Recent versions of these clients least in the first 8-bits with the key. This range of Kad implement the kad protocol. IDs around a key that agree in the first 8-bits with the key As in other DHTs, each kad node has a global identifier, is called the tolerance zone. Note that the key is not referred to as Kad ID, which is a 128 bit randomly generated published on the ten peers closest to the key, but simply on identifier. The Kad ID is generated when the client appli- peers whose Kad IDs are in the tolerance zone. To assure cation is started for the first time and is then permanently persistence of the information stored, the owner periodically stored with that client. The Kad ID stays unchanged on republishes the information every 5 or 24 hours, depending subsequent join and leaves of the peer, until the user deletes on the type of information. the application or its preferences file. However, as we show As for the publishing, the search procedure uses the rout- ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 65 Volume 37, Number 5, October 2007 ing lookup to find the peer(s) closest to the key searched zone Z of the kad network. For this, one needs to introduce for. To increase the robustness of the search in case of stale sybils in the zone Z and to make them known, so that their routing table entries, three searches are launched in parallel. presence is reflected in the routing tables of the regular, i.e. If the first arriving route response contains peers that are non-sybil peers. closer to the destination, immediately new route requests We have developed a light-weight implementation of such are sent. The four most important message types are: a “spy” that is able to create thousands of sybilsonone single physical machine as they do not keep any state about • hello : to check if the other peer is still alive and to the interactions with the regular peers [25]. inform the other peer about one’s existence and the 16 Kad ID When we spy on a 8-bit zone, we introduce 2 sybils: the and IP address. first 8 bit are defined by the zone we spy on, the following • route request/response(kid): To find peers that are 16 bits are different for each sybil. The spy works as follows: closer to the Kad ID kid. • First, crawl a zone Z of the Kad ID space using our • publish request/response: to publish information. crawler to to learn about the peers P currently online whose Kad IDsareinZ. • search request/response(key): to search for infor- mation whose hash is key. • Then, send hello requests to the peers P in order to “poison” their routing tables with entries that point 2. EXPLORING KAD to our sybils. The peers that receive a hello request We have developed our own crawler for kad,withthe will add the sybil to their routing table if the corre- aim to crawl kad frequently and over a duration of several sponding bucket of the routing table is not filled. months. Our crawler runs on a local machine and uses a • Later, when a route request(kid) initiated by regu- simple breadth first search issuing route requests to find P kad lar peer reaches a sybil that request will be answered the peers currently participating in . The speed of our with a set of sybilswhoseKad IDs are closer to the crawler allows us to crawl the entire kad system (entire kid Z Kad ID target in case the falls into the zone and ignored space) in about 8 minutes, which was never done otherwise. before. During a full crawl, we found between 3 and 4.3 million different peers. Between 1.5 and 2 million peers are This way, P has the impression of approaching the tar- not located behind NATs or firewalls and can be directly get. Once P is “close enough” to the target Kad ID, contacted by our crawler. it will initiate a publish request or search request However, to limit the network load and the data volume, also destined to one of our sybil peers. Therefore, for we decided to crawl only a part of the Kad ID space by any route request that reaches one of our sybil peers carrying out a zone crawl on a 8-bit zone, where we try we can be sure that the follow-up publish request or to find all active peers whose Kad IDshavethesame8 search request will also end-up on the same sybil. high-order bits. A zone crawl explores one 256-th of the • Store the content of all the requests received in a database entire Kad ID space and takes less than 2.5 seconds. For for later evaluation. slightly less than 6 months we crawled the same zone every 5 minutes. The detailed results of our crawl are reported in As described in Section 1, a key is published ten times and [24, 26]. for a search three parallel search requests are issued. For We made some surprising findings such as (i) several thou- our spy scheme to work as intended, the optimum would sand kad clients that all had the same Kad ID and (ii) sev- be to attract exactly one copy of every search or publish eral hundred peers with the same sub-net IP addresses and request.
Recommended publications
  • Foxx Street Gossip Zip File Download Avtok V.1.0
    foxx street gossip zip file download AvtoK v.1.0. AvtoK - multi autoclicker. Software for recording and playback of action with a keyboard and mouse, which can be repeated in autoclicker. Despite the apparent simplicity of the main window is quite powerful in its class. Scope: In games and sites that require routine activities. To automate tedious and repetitive actions on the computer. By setting the control points can analyze the image on the screen and organize complex actions. Features. Read more. Rate: License: Freeware Category: Automation Tools Developer: Ocean games Downloads: 319 Size: 1.63 Mb Price: Free. To free download a trial version of AvtoK, click here To visit developer homepage of AvtoK, click here. Screen Shot. Click on a thumbnail for the larger image. System Requirements. AvtoK requires Win2000, Win7 x32, Win7 x64, Win98, WinServer, WinVista, WinVista x64, WinXP. Buzzer v.1.1.0.0. A massive red button that plays a sound of your choice from the config menu allowing you to have a game show style buzzer. Cockerel sound Smelly bottom sound Joke drum roll sound French tart sound Door bell sound Horny horn sound Bloke who’s trapped his figure in the car boot sound Wolf whistle sound Some nifty piece of. Read more. Rate: Release Date: 09/13/2012 License: Freeware Category: Recreation Developer: FluxedDev.com Downloads: 26 Size: 6 Mb Price: Free. To free download a trial version of Buzzer, click here To visit developer homepage of Buzzer, click here. Screen Shot. Click on a thumbnail for the larger image. System Requirements.
    [Show full text]
  • The Edonkey File-Sharing Network
    The eDonkey File-Sharing Network Oliver Heckmann, Axel Bock, Andreas Mauthe, Ralf Steinmetz Multimedia Kommunikation (KOM) Technische Universitat¨ Darmstadt Merckstr. 25, 64293 Darmstadt (heckmann, bock, mauthe, steinmetz)@kom.tu-darmstadt.de Abstract: The eDonkey 2000 file-sharing network is one of the most successful peer- to-peer file-sharing applications, especially in Germany. The network itself is a hybrid peer-to-peer network with client applications running on the end-system that are con- nected to a distributed network of dedicated servers. In this paper we describe the eDonkey protocol and measurement results on network/transport layer and application layer that were made with the client software and with an open-source eDonkey server we extended for these measurements. 1 Motivation and Introduction Most of the traffic in the network of access and backbone Internet service providers (ISPs) is generated by peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing applications [San03]. These applications are typically bandwidth greedy and generate more long-lived TCP flows than the WWW traffic that was dominating the Internet traffic before the P2P applications. To understand the influence of these applications and the characteristics of the traffic they produce and their impact on network design, capacity expansion, traffic engineering and shaping, it is important to empirically analyse the dominant file-sharing applications. The eDonkey file-sharing protocol is one of these file-sharing protocols. It is imple- mented by the original eDonkey2000 client [eDonkey] and additionally by some open- source clients like mldonkey [mlDonkey] and eMule [eMule]. According to [San03] it is with 52% of the generated file-sharing traffic the most successful P2P file-sharing net- work in Germany, even more successful than the FastTrack protocol used by the P2P client KaZaa [KaZaa] that comes to 44% of the traffic.
    [Show full text]
  • Conducting and Optimizing Eclipse Attacks in the Kad Peer-To-Peer Network
    Conducting and Optimizing Eclipse Attacks in the Kad Peer-to-Peer Network Michael Kohnen, Mike Leske, and Erwin P. Rathgeb University of Duisburg-Essen, Institute for Experimental Mathematics, Ellernstr. 29, 45326 Essen [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract. The Kad network is a structured P2P network used for file sharing. Research has proved that Sybil and Eclipse attacks have been possible in it until recently. However, the past attacks are prohibited by newly implemented secu- rity measures in the client applications. We present a new attack concept which overcomes the countermeasures and prove its practicability. Furthermore, we analyze the efficiency of our concept and identify the minimally required re- sources. Keywords: P2P security, Sybil attack, Eclipse attack, Kad. 1 Introduction and Related Work P2P networks form an overlay on top of the internet infrastructure. Nodes in a P2P network interact directly with each other, i.e., no central entity is required (at least in case of structured P2P networks). P2P networks have become increasingly popular mainly because file sharing networks use P2P technology. Several studies have shown that P2P traffic is responsible for a large share of the total internet traffic [1, 2]. While file sharing probably accounts for the largest part of the P2P traffic share, also other P2P applications exist which are widely used, e.g., Skype [3] for VoIP or Joost [4] for IPTV. The P2P paradigm is becoming more and more accepted also for professional and commercial applications (e.g., Microsoft Groove [5]), and therefore, P2P technology is one of the key components of the next generation internet.
    [Show full text]
  • PSP-Auto: a DHT-Based Data Storage and Retrieval System for Automation
    PSP-Auto: A DHT-based Data Storage and Retrieval System for Automation Jan Skodzik, Peter Danielis, Vlado Altmann, Eike Bjoern Schweissguth, Dirk Timmermann University of Rostock Institute of Applied Microelectronics and Computer Engineering 18051 Rostock, Germany, Tel./Fax: +49 381 498-7284 / -1187251 Email: [email protected] Abstract—In the field of automation, reliability is a key aspect which utilizes volatile rather than rarely available persistent to enable resilient systems. Especially, in areas with extreme memory as miniature devices often have a low or no memory conditions a reliable monitoring is necessary such as factory, capacity anyway. In the preliminary works [3] and [4], it volcano, or laboratory monitoring. These are environments where devices could be stressed uncommonly high and thus more devices has already been shown that a distributed memory can be could fail in a shorter time period in the worst case. Centralized realized by means of the so-called Peer-to-Peer-based Storage monitoring systems, which work in real-time for security reasons, Platform (PSP). Thereby, network elements of an Internet contain a single point of failure in the form of a central control service provider in the access network were networked to store instance. Additionally, if the central instance fails no data is configuration data. As basis, the decentralized and structured available any more as the central instance usually works as the only data sink in the system. Furthermore, with an increasing P2P protocol Kad has been applied. However, the requirements number of devices this system does not scale well. As the number in automation environments are more demanding than in access of devices and their performance will prospectively increase, a networks as automation environments require tremendously new approach is necessary to handle these large-scale systems.
    [Show full text]
  • A Study of Peer-To-Peer Systems
    A Study of Peer-to-Peer Systems JIA, Lu A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Philosophy in Information Engineering The Chinese University of Hong Kong August 2009 Abstract of thesis entitled: A Study of Peer-to-Peer Systems Submitted by JIA, Lu for the degree of Master of Philosophy at The Chinese University of Hong Kong in June 2009 Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have evolved rapidly and become immensely popular in Internet. Users in P2P systems can share resources with each other and in this way the server loading is reduced. P2P systems' good performance and scalability attract a lot of interest in the research community as well as in industry. Yet, P2P systems are very complicated systems. Building a P2P system requires carefully and repeatedly thinking and ex- amining architectural design issues. Instead of setting foot in all aspects of designing a P2P system, this thesis focuses on two things: analyzing reliability and performance of different tracker designs and studying a large-scale P2P file sharing system, Xun- lei. The "tracker" of a P2P system is used to lookup which peers hold (or partially hold) a given object. There are various designs for the tracker function, from a single-server tracker, to DHT- based (distributed hash table) serverless systems. In the first part of this thesis, we classify the different tracker designs, dis- cuss the different considerations for these designs, and provide simple models to evaluate the reliability of these designs. Xunlei is a new proprietary P2P file sharing protocol that has become very popular in China.
    [Show full text]
  • Emule Apk Free Download
    Emule apk free download Continue The app was created to work on ED2K (eDonkey2000 protocol) networks, right on your mobile device! it's not a remote control. Disclaimer: We are not affiliated with the eMule project. Mule for Android provides basic functionality: search for files on servers, download files, share files. You can watch videos while downloading files using the preview feature. The use is simple: when you first start, select an incoming directory; Then, search for files and download them. Buy a paid version if you want to remove ads. Kademlia's initial support is here!. Search sources and keywords are available now. When you first start KAD, you need a download site (IP/port) or a node.dat file at your download location. You can download nodes.dat directly from the mule - click the download button on the preference page to the right of the KAD switch. Check the KAD status with the information button - when YOU work KAD you will see not an empty KAD table. Let me know if you have a problem. It's not a remote control. Disclaimer: We are not affiliated with the eMule project. Mule for Android provides the main features available: search for files on servers, download files, file sharing. You can watch videos when you download files with a preview feature. The use is simple: when you first start, select the input directory; then look for the files and download them. Buy the full version if you want to remove the ads. Kademlia's initial support is here!. Search sources and keywords are now available.
    [Show full text]
  • Vasco Alexandre Maia Dos Santos Infraestrutura Segura E
    Departamento de Eletrónica, Universidade de Aveiro Telecomunicações e Informática 2016 Vasco Alexandre Infraestrutura Segura e Descentralizada para a Maia dos Santos Internet das Coisas Secure Decentralized Internet of Things Infrastructure Departamento de Eletrónica, Universidade de Aveiro Telecomunicações e Informática 2016 Vasco Alexandre Infraestrutura Segura e Descentralizada para a Maia dos Santos Internet das Coisas Secure Decentralized Internet of Things Infrastructure “The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds” — Theo Jansen Departamento de Eletrónica, Universidade de Aveiro Telecomunicações e Informática 2016 Vasco Alexandre Infraestrutura Segura e Descentralizada para a Maia dos Santos Internet das Coisas Secure Decentralized Internet of Things Infrastructure Dissertação apresentada à Universidade de Aveiro para cumprimento dos re- quisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia de Com- putadores e Telemática, realizada sob a orientação científica do Doutor Diogo Nuno Pereira Gomes, Professor auxiliar do Departamento de Eletrónica, Te- lecomunicações e Informática da Universidade de Aveiro, e do Doutor João Paulo Silva Barraca, Professor auxiliar do Departamento de Eletrónica, Tele- comunicações e Informática da Universidade de Aveiro. o júri / the jury presidente / president Prof. Doutor André Ventura da Cruz Marnoto Zúquete professor auxiliar da Universidade de Aveiro vogais / examiners committee Prof. Doutora Ana Cristina Costa Aguiar professora auxiliar convidada da Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto Prof. Doutor Diogo Nuno Pereira Gomes professor auxiliar da Universidade de Aveiro (orientador) agradecimentos / Gostava de agradecer, em primeiro lugar ao Professor Doutor Diogo Gomes acknowledgements e ao Professor Doutor João Paulo Barraca pela oportunidade de integrar o ATNOG e trabalhar nesta dissertação, bem como por todo o apoio dado ao longo do mestrado.
    [Show full text]
  • A Blockchain System Based on Quantum-Resistant Digital Signature
    Hindawi Security and Communication Networks Volume 2021, Article ID 6671648, 13 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/6671648 Research Article A Blockchain System Based on Quantum-Resistant Digital Signature Peijun Zhang ,1 Lianhai Wang ,1 Wei Wang ,1 Kunlun Fu ,1 and Jinpeng Wang 2 1Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Computer Networks, Shandong Computer Science Center (National Supercomputer Center in Jinan), Jinan 250014, China 2Shandong Computer Science Center (National Supercomputer Center in Jinan), Jinan 250014, China Correspondence should be addressed to Lianhai Wang; [email protected] Received 17 December 2020; Revised 23 January 2021; Accepted 1 February 2021; Published 4 March 2021 Academic Editor: Debiao He Copyright © 2021 Peijun Zhang et al. ,is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Blockchain, which has a distributed structure, has been widely used in many areas. Especially in the area of smart cities, blockchain technology shows great potential. ,e security issues of blockchain affect the construction of smart cities to varying degrees. With the rapid development of quantum computation, elliptic curves cryptosystems used in blockchain are not secure enough. ,is paper presents a blockchain system based on lattice cipher, which can resist the attack of quantum computation. ,e most challenge is that the size of public keys and signatures used by lattice cryptosystems is typically very large. As a result, each block in a blockchain can only accommodate a small number of transactions.
    [Show full text]
  • Copyright Infringement (DMCA)
    Copyright Infringement (DMCA) Why it is important to understand the DMCA: Kent State University (KSU) is receiving more and more copyright infringement notices every semester, risking the loss of ‘safe harbor’ status. Resident students, KSU faculty, staff, and student employees, and the University itself could be at risk of costly litigation, expensive fines, damage to reputation, and possible jail time. What you need to know about KSU’s role: ● KSU is not a policing organization. ● KSU does not actively monitor computing behavior. ● KSU reacts to infringement notices generated by agents of the copyright holders ● KSU expends a significant amount of time/money protecting the identity of students by maintaining ‘safe harbor’ status KSU is ‘the good guy’ – we’re focused on educating our community What you need to know if your student receives a copyright infringement notice: They were identified as using P2P software and illegally sharing copyrighted material (whether downloading to their computer or allowing others to download from their computer). They will be informed of the notice via email, and their network connection to external resources (sites outside of KSU) will be disabled to maintain ‘safe harbor’ status until such time as they have complied with the University’s requirements under the DMCA. They can face sanctions ranging from blocked connectivity to dismissal from the University. Definition of terms: DMCA: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 was signed into law in the United States to protect the intellectual property rights of copyright holders of electronic media (music, movies, software, games, etc.). The DMCA allows KSU to operate as an OSP.
    [Show full text]
  • Decentralized Location-Aware Orchestration of Containerized Microservice Applications
    DOCTORAL T H E SIS Lara Lorna Jiménez Decentralized Location-aware Orchestration of Containerized Microservice Applications of Containerized Orchestration Microservice Lara Lorna Jiménez Decentralized Location-aware Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Division of Computer Science ISSN 1402-1544 Decentralized Location-aware ISBN 978-91-7790-617-9 (print) ISBN 978-91-7790-618-6 (pdf) Orchestration of Containerized Luleå University of Technology 2020 Microservice Applications Enabling Distributed Intelligence at the Edge Lara Lorna Jiménez Pervasive and Mobile Computing Decentralized Location-aware Orchestration of Containerized Microservice Applications Enabling Distributed Intelligence at the Edge Lara Lorna Jiménez Luleå University of Technology Department of of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Division of Computer Science Printed by Luleå University of Technology, Graphic Production 2020 ISSN 1402-1544 ISBN 978-91-7790-617-9 (print) ISBN 978-91-7790-618-6 (pdf) Luleå 2020 www.ltu.se Decentralized Location-aware Orchestration of Containerized Microservice Applications Enabling Distributed Intelligence at the Edge Lara Lorna Jim´enez Dept. of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Lule˚aUniversity of Technology Sweden Supervisors: Olov Schel´enand K˚areSynnes ii To my parents iii iv Abstract Services that operate on public, private, or hybrid clouds, should always be available and reachable to their end-users or clients. However, a shift in the demand for current and future services has led to new requirements on network infrastructure, service orches- tration, and Quality-of-Service (QoS). Services related to, for example, online-gaming, video-streaming, smart cities, smart homes, connected cars, or other Internet-of-Things (IoT) powered use cases are data-intensive and often have real-time and locality require- ments.
    [Show full text]
  • Download-Emule-Kad-Server-List.Pdf
    Download Emule Kad Server List Download Emule Kad Server List 1 / 3 2 / 3 web site page displaying list of all active servers on the eDonkey/eMule p2p network. ... ping test update servers list at client start download list in eMule.. 0.50a installed on my computer. I can connect to eD2K network easily but I can't connect to Kad network. I have tried to download from http://www.nodes-dat.com/ but the first button " Add to eMule (from Nodes Server)" did't work and the other two worked but the problem still remains.. Bezpieczna lista serwerów emule do pobrania. Pobierz listę zawsze aktualną. Download server.met & serverlist for eMule.. eMule now connects to both the eDonkey network and the Kad network. ... eMule will use clients it knows already from the ed2k servers to get connected to Kad .... The servers merely help hold the network together. Meanwhile, Kad is a network that is also connectable via eMule. Unlike the ED2K network, ... You can use the easy to use installer or you can download the binaries. The difference is that the .... nodes.dat nodes for emule kademlia net server edonkey overnet. ... von IP/Port im Kad-Fenster, oder. - per Download aus dem Internent, z.B. nodes.dat.. Connecting to servers hasn't been working for a long time. ... started them again (there is free drive space on the download drive) but can't get a Kad connection. ... Block4: ipfilter.dat, nodes.dat, server.met (emule-security.org). Dodaj do #eMule te 2 pliki : Do serwerów, czyli eD2k --- http://www.server-list.info/ Do Kad ---..
    [Show full text]
  • 00079-141173.Pdf (5.08
    CHRIS JAY HOOFNAGLE Adjunct Full Professor School of Information School of Law Faculty Director Berkeley Center for Law & Technology August 22, 2017 University of California, Berkeley VIA THE WEB Berkeley, CA Tel: 5 Federal Trade Commission https://hoofnagle.berkeley.edu Office of the Secretary 600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. Suite CC–5610 (Annex B) Washington, DC 20580 Re: Comment of Chris Hoofnagle on Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN–SPAM Rule, 16 CFR part 316, Project No. R711010) Dear Mr. Brown, Thank you for soliciting public comment on the CAN–SPAM Rule. My comments below focus on the need for the CAN–SPAM Rule, the costs that spam imposes on consumers and the economy, the prospect that technical interventions on intermediaries can be effective, that spam senders strategically use transaction costs to deter recipients from opting out, that senders impose privacy penalties on those who opt out, for the FTC to consider third-party lookups for email addresses to be an aggravated violation of CAN–SPAM, to revisit that the idea of a Do-Not-Email Registry, and finally, to keep the computer science literature on spam in focus. There is a Continuing Need for the CAN–SPAM Rule Because the Injuries Caused by Spam Are Economic and Social and Are on Par with Serious Crimes In a 2001 speech, FTC Chairman Timothy Muris identified spam messages as injurious under the Commission’s “harm-based” approach.1 Today, the majority of e-mail is spam. Senders of marketing e- mails can leverage the technical and economic properties of the internet to send tens of billions of messages a day.
    [Show full text]