Hidden networks or how the old philosophy of the Internet became a waste of reality

Introduction

Present tense. The widespread monopolization of the market was the result of former competition. Companies and states have grown together so much that it is already difficult to separate one from the other. The Internet, whose anonymity was considered absolute, and whose actions were uncontrollable, ceased to be such. Now the Internet has built control over both words and deeds, both on the part of transnational companies and on the part of states. All of the above examples are not plots of William Gibson, but represent a real and tangible reality. What used to be considered fantasy is now reality.

Progress is always also a relative regression. And along with the evolution of the development of Internet communications, the primary, weak anonymity has undergone involution, thereby ceasing to be a global quality of the Internet. The accumulated contradictions between states, corporations for the control of information on the one hand and ordinary users demanding anonymity on the other, gave rise to two phenomena – the right to anonymity put forward by states, and hidden (anonymous) networks created by Internet users.

A few words about the right to anonymity

It is probably not worth saying that at present the right to anonymity is being violated everywhere, not only in Russia by the “Yarovaya package” of 2016, but also in the USA by the good old PRISM project, which hardly ceased to exist after glasnost in 2013. It can also be assumed that the right to anonymity was hardly ever a right that states and/or corporations themselves were going to actually observe. Rather, it was nothing more than a popularist move, which remains the same and is still in the hands of politicians.

Ironically, the development of the right to anonymity in the world can be demonstrated by a laconic paragraph in wikipedia:

On the example of China, one can trace the development of the right to anonymity in the developing countries of the world. In mid-October 2019, the Chinese government announced the introduction of “face control” for Internet users. Chinese citizens will have to undergo a face scan when applying for mobile or Internet services in order to facilitate identification later.

Among other things, it would be very optimistic to consider the rights put forward by states as something inviolable and permanent, especially the right to anonymity, where there is a clear interest of the states themselves to violate established rights, either for an economic purpose, if such states cooperate well with monopolies, or for a political purpose. if public opinion and its vector of development become beneficial to the state.

In any case, the whole rigmarole with rights described above is very well described by Baudrillard in the “consumer society” of 1970:

You can talk about the right to health, space, the right to beauty,
vacation, the right to knowledge, to culture. And as they perform
these new rights are born at the same time ministries: health,
recreation; why not beauty, clean air? Everything that seems
expresses the general, individual and collective, progress that could
sanction the right to a social institution has a dual meaning,
so you can sort of understand it the other way around: there is a right to space only from the moment when there is no more space for everyone and when space and silence become the privilege of some to the detriment of
others. Therefore, the “right to property” arose only beginning
from the moment when there was no more land for all, the right to work arose
only when labor within the division of labor has become exchangeable
goods, that is, not belonging, in fact, to individuals.

Thus, one can continue further: “the right to anonymity arose only when anonymity became a waste of network communications.” And under the waste, we can assume a dual meaning: 1) garbage that will be burned sooner or later (be it states or corporations); 2) exit from the vast set of all network communications into a small subset, where the principles of the same anonymity are still preserved; In any case, both meanings remain, to one degree or another, true in the current realities and do not contradict each other.

A few words about hidden networks

Hidden (anonymous) networks are the response of ordinary Internet users to deanonymization by state apparatuses, and then by monopoly corporations. There are a fairly large number of anonymous networks, and each is unique in its own way, based on certain threat models, and due to this, it reaches a certain level (quality) of anonymity. You can see more details about online anonymity in my article on Habré or in a more extensive article in the repository github.

The work of hidden (anonymous) networks occurs at the overlay level, in other words, for the operation of this kind of networks, an already configured primary network is required according to the principle of the Internet. The fact that the Internet was designed in such a non-anonymous way (in terms of anonymous networks) is primarily due to: 1) the main goals – speed, fault tolerance; 2) economic reasons – renewability, scalability. Theoretically, anonymous networks could be a homogeneous structure, if you take Netsukuku for example, but in practice such a network has not been implemented. Plus, even if the Netsukuku project or others like it remained alive to this day, and were also tested in real conditions, they would hardly be able to replace the established Internet, which had already become the platform for most communication services at the time of its inception. work of alternative solutions. Thus, all modern anonymous networks are overlays and operate on top of the Internet, which implies overhead, because you have to work with all the information at the application layer of the TCP / IP model.

Further, it can be assumed that anonymous networks technically and in practice can successfully exist in the current realities, and in the optimistic future, be the leading form of all network communications, as overlay solutions. But if we take into account the monopolization of the market and the increasing control of state apparatuses, and present their sum in the form of centralized mechanisms, then the following points will inevitably appear:

1. The explicit interests of some (profit, control) and the abstract interests of others (communication, search for information) lead the latter only to passive objections, revolts without any crushing result when they understand that the information they generate is out of control. On the other hand, just such a contradiction is the most important, because it initiates a slow, gradual, but still development of alternative solutions. An example of such behavior was at one time the publicity of the PRISM project, which was able to initiate mass discontent among the population of the whole world, as well as the development of applications aimed at information security and user anonymity. However, such clarity did not bring any fatal result. All created applications became only a special case of a more general communication model, and monopolies and corporations still continued to cooperate with the state apparatus.

2. The comfort of using services begins to gradually and implicitly overlap with the current level of security, to some extent relegating it to the background, because end customers are more likely to choose a more productive system than a safe and slow one. On the part of companies and corporations, design can be dictated, modified, subject to fashion, while security remains always a process without end, complex, invisible, and, as a result, less significant for ordinary users. Such a different reaction of customers to comfort and safety becomes to a certain extent beneficial to the manufacturer by reducing the cost of real security of developed or supported systems.

3. Centralized systems, by their economic nature, always move towards a concentration of connections, a kind of monopoly, due to which many services explicitly and implicitly begin to merge, expand, grow together, which can also lead to more successful suppression of other systems – hybrid, decentralized or small centralized due to competition. When a certain critical mass of connection concentration is reached, centralized systems begin to be built at the expense of economic influence – political, as a result of which fines (on the part of the company itself) for information leakage become less than the cost of hiring information security specialists, where antitrust companies play a significant role, which are all such but the product of centralized mechanisms, rarely really and in practice opposing monopolies. In this scenario, repressive measures aimed at reducing the quantity and quality of information leaks (by internal employees of the company) become more legal in nature. As a result of all this, real security becomes redundant for monopolistic centralized systems.

4. The economic basis for the existence of centralized systems does not allow getting out of the existing imperative of things, because centralization itself is only a consequence of the economic need to manage resources, including human ones. A break in the paradigm will inevitably lead to bankruptcy and to the fact of the subsequent absorption of residual resources by another, more successful centralized system.

5. Centralized systems are more flexible in creating new communication technologies because they ignore or minimize the security of the client side and have all the necessary resources, as well as all the necessary user information, to carry out successful update iterations. These properties allow centralized mechanisms to develop faster and more efficiently implement new solutions, ahead of alternative systems by several steps.

6. Decentralized systems have the property of “corrosion” by centralized forms. This property is a consequence of the high stability of centralized communications, in which decentralization will always strive to build faster, higher-quality connections by establishing a limited set of stable or stabilizing nodes, which will inevitably lead to concentration of subsequent connections and a relative regression of rhizomorphic components.

Thus, the world of the anonymous future is quite far away. Anonymous network designers must resolve most (if not all) of the above points, and even then there is no 100% guarantee that the transition can actually take place. Centralized mechanisms will do their best to resist such phenomena if they lead either to economic losses or to loss of control over information (which does not exclude economic losses).

Conclusion

It must be admitted that practical anonymity, which it used to be for a wide circle of people, has ceased to be such. Now anonymity, although much better than the original one, belongs only to a limited circle of people: geeks, cypherpunks, journalists or criminals, but not to the remaining mass of the Earth’s population. It harms corporations and states, it is excessive for ordinary people. Any access to the anonymous network is a conversation in a whisper, not freedom of speech. Such an outcome of events only testifies to the fact that corporations and states have coped with their main goal – they were able to deanonymize and uniquely identify the population. As a result of all this, the hidden networks have become just a waste of reality, a simulated outlet for the old philosophy of the Internet. And all that remains for us is to sing a requiem for the old times, when anonymity, although of poor quality, but quantitative, could exist in the virtual space.

“I have found freedom. The loss of all hope was freedom.” – Fight club.

I could quote this quote, but there is also some doubt (or optimism) about the fatality of what is happening. The development of safe technologies begins to take place partly by the monopolies themselves due to the general movement of the economy in order to capture new markets. On the example of this, one can see the blockchain, which, on the one hand, is an extremely raw technology in terms of mass application, and in some cases even extremely centralized, but at the same time having primary rudiments of stored information security. On this, I also posted an article on Habré. The security of transmitted or stored information can gradually, step by step, evolve over time into the anonymity of the subjects themselves. But for now, these are just dreams of the future.