A view from Dubai and WTSA

I am just back from the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The conference itself sets terms and work plan for the standardization sector of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for the next four years. This was a political conference, where much jockeying for position ahead of the World Conference on International Telecommunication will occur this week.

There were debates over seemingly innocuous definitions and terms, like ICT or Operating Authority versus Recognized Operating Authority. I was part of the delegation from ISOC as the IETF liaison manager, which meant I mostly observed the proceedings, occasionally speaking with representatives from various countries.

Dubai itself is a lovely city with many activities. While I’m not sure I could get used to its summer temperatures, in November we enjoyed a pleasant 27°C, with a bit of a breeze.

Our hosts were quite generous and made us feel welcome. I didn’t get a chance to do much sight seeing, but what you are looking at below is my colleague Tony with a friend Mahmoud from Oman, in front of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, one of the most beautiful structures I have ever seen. It is rounded and terraced every 10-15 floors. We were by the Dubai fountains which themselves are an enjoyable spectacle.

Should the ITU Handle Cybersecurity or Cybercrime?

Cybercrime and cybersecurity are two very important topics that are largely being lost in the noise around the American elections, the Arab Spring, or the European banking crisis. Nevertheless, there is an attempt by the ITU and some governments to take a more active role in this space.

Roughly defined, cybercrime is a crime that occurs or is facilitated by computers. Cybersecurity is the actions taken to protect against cybercrime. This includes protection of devices so that they don’t get broken into, and remediation.

Cybercrime itself is a complex issue. It relates to many things, including fraud, data theft, privacy theft, and just about any criminal endeavor that happened before the term “cyber” ever came to be. There’s a great paper by a laundry list of Who’s Who in the economics of cybersecurity that proposes methods of estimating actual losses, breaking down crime into various categories. Statistics in this space are remarkably fluid- that is, there are poor standards for data collection.

As it turns out, there is a treaty on cybercrime, conveniently called The Convention on Cybercrime, developed in the Council of Europe. Nearly all of Europe, as well as the U.S. and a number of other countries have ratified this treaty, and there other signatories. Research from the University of Singapore has already shown that either accession to the treaty or even becoming congruent with it will reduce a country’s cybercrime rate. While the causalities are not clearly explained in that paper, one part is obvious: the first part of the treaty is what amounts to a best practices document for governments, on how they should develop legislation.

The treaty itself is fairly involved and took many years to get as many signatures as it did. It has to deal with diverse societies who have differing constitutional views on freedom of speech and expression, as well as on due process.

The Secretary General of the ITU and his staff, as well as a few governments, have been under the impression that the ITU could do a better job than what was done by the Council of Europe. There is little chance of this happening, and in all likelihood, they would make matters worse, if for no other reason (and there are other reasons) that anyone who already signed the Convention would have to reconcile differences between that and whatever would be created by the ITU.

There are other reasons the ITU cannot do better, not least of which is that they lack the technical expertise to actively engage in cybersecurity. Part of the problem is that most Internet standards are not ITU standards, but come from elsewhere. While the ITU has any number of standards involving fiber optics management, and good codec support, the computer you’re reading this blog on uses mostly the work of others. Another reason is that the state of the art in both cybercrime and cybersecurity is rapidly moving, beyond the ITU’s capability to adapt. Here’s just one example: contrary to what people had thought, the battle ground for cybercrime has not really moved to mobile devices. As we’ve previously discussed, this has a lot to do with the update mechanisms and business models in play, but the most notable one being that applications on the iPhone in particular are both reviewed by Apple and signed. The only iPhone you hear about being vulnerable is the one that has been cracked by the owner, and that doesn’t account for a whole lot.

One WCIT proposal that refers to spam as a threat demonstrates how far off some governments are on the subject. Spam itself has never really been much of a threat, but more of an annoyance. 80-90% of it is never delivered to the end user, and most Evil Doers have moved on to more sophisticated approaches, such as spear phishing. Worse, the ITU-T’s study group 17 had to take years simply to come up with a definition of spam, when it really was a problem.

This is not to say that the ITU shouldn’t have a role to play with cybersecurity. The ITU has extraordinarily access to governments of developing countries, and can work with them to improve their cybersecurity posture, through training and outreach. In fact they do some of this in their Development or ITU-D Sector. One thing that the D sector has done recently has been to put developing governments in touch with FIRST, the organization that coordinates discussion among Computer Incident Response Teams or CIRTs. But the ITU should give up any idea that it can play more of a role than outreach and capacity building, all of which should be done in consultation with actual experts.

Are bad iPhone maps a security problem?

A while ago I talked about business models and how they impact security. The key thing then was that Apple had a direct path to the consumer, which drove update rates of iOS very quickly, in comparison to Android. Implicit in all of that was that consumers would find a reason to upgrade to the latest software.

Now we see a new version 6 of iOS that has what can only be described as a miserable replacement for Google Maps, as well as a number of reported problems with WiFi connectivity. All of a sudden, the tables are turned. Are the 200 new features found in iOS worth risking one’s ability to use WiFi or have accurate mapping information? Note that the question makes no reference to security. That’s because consumers don’t care about that.

So, here’s the thing to watch, and Google will be watching very closely: what is the adoption rate of iOS version 5 as compared to its predecessor? The converted have already moved over. Now it’s time for the rest of us. Will we or won’t we? I already have decided to wait for a “.0.1” version of iOS 6, as my iPhone works fine as is, and none of the new features really seem so interesting, such that I want to risk breaking WiFi or my maps. Note again, I’m not even mentioning security.

WCIT and the ITU?

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is making the news these days, in part because there is about to be a treaty conference called the World Conferences on International Tariffs (WCIT). What is the ITU? and what do they do?

The ITU is a specialized agency of the United Nations that focuses on telecommunications. It has four components:

A general secretariat;
A standardization sector or ITU-T;
A radio coordination sector or ITU-R; and
A development sector or ITU-D;

The radio sector coordinates spectrum allocation and so-called “orbital satellite slots”. It also is responsible for standardization of time. The development sector focuses on the special needs of developing countries. The standardization sector has over 150 years set international standards for telecommunications, starting with the telegraph. The general secretariat manages logistics of the three sectors, and represents the ITU to other international fora, and to the U.N.

How has the ITU been relevant to you? There are several key standards that are worth taking note of:

E.164 specifies pretty much what a telephone number looks like, starting with the international dialing code.
G.711, G.719 and others specify how voice is encoded into data.
X.509 is the basis for the public key infrastructure that is in use on the World Wide Web.
D.50 specifies accounting standards by which international carriers bill each other, or so-called settlement rates. There’s real money involved in this one.

This is some pretty important stuff.

The ITU-T was formed out of the CCITT, which was a coordination committee, primarily made of European governments. These days, its membership spans 193 countries. Only governments may vote, although civil society and paying sector members may have some influence.

So what is WCIT? WCIT is a treaty-level conference in which all those lovely accounting rates are agreed upon. But they’re not stopping there. The ITU-T has had a very limited role in the Internet’s development. Standardization and governance over the Internet falls to several classes of entities:

National governments with their own sets of laws;
Standards organizations such as the IEEE, IETF, W3C, and 3GPP; and
Not-for-profit organizations such as ICANN and Internet Registries.

This latter group focuses on what I call “internals”. That is- how do you get an IP address or a domain name? The Internet has grown over 1.25 billion users with very limited involvement of the ITU-T.

Now governments want to take a firmer hand in areas such as how addresses and names are allocated and cybersecurity. That is what WCIT is about.

More about the ITU and WCIT in the future.

Is Google Green or Wasteful?

Google Smoke Stack Today’s New York Times has an interesting article about how Google uses enough electricity on its own to power 200,000 American homes. Google claims that it’s using that energy so that consumers don’t have to, and that in fact they do so more efficiently than consumers in aggregate would. There’s some small merit to the argument they’re making, but it isn’t obvious at first glance.

Google’s argument is that they’re saving you a trip to the library when you do a search. That might be true sometimes, of course, but the chances are you didn’t go anyway. For one, you might have instead picked up your local yellow pages, or an Atlas, or written a postcard. But yes, sometimes you might have gone to the library– with your car.

Often times we the consumers get tricked into thinking that all big numbers are meaningful. Let me give you an example from the networking industry. It is not unheard of for a high power Internet router to suck a lot of power. A fully configured Cisco CRS-1 uses about 8Kw of power. These are big pieces of hardware that can each serve the needs of thousands of customers. Perhaps there are 2,000 of them and their ilk in America, and probably less. And so at any moment that’s about 16 megawatts worth of power. Big number, right? And so let’s say that we found a way to cut their power consumption by 10%. Per box, that’s 800 watts. That’s a lot of power, right?

Now let’s look at a consumer router. You know the ones- Linksys, D-Link, etc. They use about 8 watts of power. Of course there are about 89 million of those devices out there[1][2]. That means that savings of a single watt of power in those devices saves 89 megawatts.

Why do I mention all of this? Who cares about how much power Google consumes?! The real issue is the computer you’re reading this post with. There are orders of magnitude more of those than there are of the computers that Google uses to return a search result or your email.

But what do you get for that energy usage? Well, you don’t have to have your bills sent to you in paper copy, and you don’t have to use the ink to write a check, and you don’t have to have as many checks printed, and you don’t need to receive paper copies of the TV guide, and you might not even use DVDs any more if you’re using NetFlix. In fact, you probably didn’t read the New York Times article on printed paper! You don’t need to fax, because you can email, and you probably don’t even know how good your handwriting is, these days, because you’ve been typing.

This is not to say that the technology sector shouldn’t do a better job at recycling or energy use. And it’s good that we look at the total cost of what we consume. But let’s also recognize the benefits.