Silk, Fire and Another Loss For Privacy

http://jnorthrop.tumblr.com/post/10802288463/silk-fire-and-another-loss-for-privacy

by jnorthrop • 15 years ago

51 30 15 years ago

jnorthrop.tumblr.com

RexRollman• 15 years ago

According to Ars Technica's article on Silk, it is possible to turn off the split browsing mode and use Silk as a regular web browser, so people who have privacy issues with this can turn it off.

metamatt3• 15 years ago

Yup. Also pointed out here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3051585), sourced to the official terms and conditions (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...).

Nate75Sanders• 15 years ago

Just playing devil's advocate here: They mention "aggregate user behavior", so they could be building a large, aggregated Markov chain that stores no user data whatsoever -- just site transition data for the world.

I haven't read in-depth analysis of how they do their stuff, though.

ck22• 15 years ago

It's worse than that for webservers.

I block all Amazon AWS/EC2 on my servers because it's never humans and I've yet to see a useful bot from there - they just suck bandwidth and cpu time. Since they have free, unlimited inbound, there's a bunch of nonsense going on.

Now I suspect silk is going to use the same IP range as amazon aws, so if you block aws, you block silk?

So no more using iptables to stop the traffic - maybe I can do it on another layer, allowing the ip via user-agent but of course bots will start spoofing that too.

Anyone know if silk will cache and serve content that is not fresh while ignoring no-cache headers?

Bonus points if anyone as access to a Fire and can test the ip range and header obedience (as well as pre-fetching aggressiveness).

ScottWhigham• 15 years ago

Good question and I haven't seen a response yet. This may be a serious problem for Amazon since you aren't alone in your blocking of AWS/EC2 IP ranges. If users use the tablet and find that the Silk browser doesn't show them all the sites they want, then people will be disappointed in Amazon. Hopefully they'll separate/segment IPs to prevent users from not using the browser.

MatthewPhillips2• 15 years ago

More likely, if AWS fails to fetch a page it will fallback on the browser to do the work. So the user will still get to the page they want, and your site will be blamed for being "slow" due to blocking AWS caching.

jonknee3• 15 years ago

Silk is supposed to be dynamic and work on AWS when it helps and locally when it doesn't. In your case I'd assume Silk users would have a slower, but successful, time using your site.

Perhaps they'll still make it easy to identify so that you can give Silk users the best experience possible, but there's no way it's just not going to work.

mustpax3• 15 years ago

To be fair, blocking the whole AWS/EC2 ip range is not being a very good web citizen. Surely there are better ways of detecting and throttling bots?

qjz2• 15 years ago

I also block AWS/EC2 on my servers because it's a relentless source of badly behaved bots, freeloading SEO scrapers, and poorly misguided startup ideas (no, I don't want you to proxy SSL connections for my users--just think about it for a second, for crying out loud).

Now with Fire & Silk in the mix, how do you even go about protecting your content from Amazon, if they can get it directly from the browser, cache it, and make it available to their own paying customers (who might have been blocked by your firewall, for whatever reason)?

I can accept that since it's technically possible, they'll just do it, and resistance is futile. But if you want to locate bad netizens, AWS/EC2 is an excellent starting point.

Remember, this isn't just about publicly-available content, it undermines the entire trust model of TLS/SSL (and exposes some of its underlying weaknesses, hopefully spurring development of a better solution in the long run).

Twisol• 15 years ago

If the Silk servers add an an X-Forwarded-For header to the request, you might be able to do it that way. I'd be pretty disappointed if they don't, actually.

talmand4• 15 years ago

There is no such thing as privacy on the internet. Only the illusion of privacy exists.

esrauch2• 15 years ago

I don't think this is quite accurate; it's actually somewhat similar to say that there is no privacy in the real world because you have to travel through public property to get anywhere.

Anyone could follow you to any store, keep ultimate tabs on where you go and who you meet. Except that isn't a problem, it doesn't happen. And it's not that people don't see you go places; it's very unlikely that you can make it from your house to the grocery store without a bunch of people seeing your car and its unique identifier of a license plate.

The thing is that it is almost always different people that see your car on each trip, and those people would be hard pressed to connect your license plate back to your name or your house address.

This is true on the internet when your mail, your news source, your social network all are separate entities that have no real way to link between each other. Many people knowing a tiny portion of your identity is very nearly the same thing as none of them knowing anything; and with only the smallest amount of effort that is easily possible to achieve on the internet.

talmand4• 15 years ago

Imagine your ISP is some guy that goes wherever you go and sees whatever you see and hears whatever you hear and so on.

Now imagine that the guy is willing to share that information with others due to court order or a nominal fee.

Your analogy works if you imagine the privacy issue is other internet users seeing what you are doing while they are going about doing whatever it is they are doing.

Unless you have a direct connection to the Internet that does not go through a third party everything you do on the Internet is open to the possibility of being tracked. You use a gateway to get to the Internet and you are not the gatekeeper.

danudey• 15 years ago

Privacy in the sense of 'what websites do I visit' or 'what am I posting on Facebook' is one thing; privacy in the sense of 'how much money does online banking say I have?' is another issue entirely.

talmand4• 15 years ago

That is true.

Depends on how trustworthy we think security certificates are in the long run.

mustpax3• 15 years ago

When intercepting a regular HTTP session Silk is no more of a MITM attack than any ISP out there. I trust Amazon more than I trust AT&T or Verizon.

What disturbs me is that Amazon Silk will terminate SSL on their end by default.* This is the break from the past that's worrisome.

* Source: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_l...

jonknee3• 15 years ago

"Amazon Silk will facilitate a direct connection between your device and that site. Any security provided by these particular sites to their users would still exist."

Between your device and that site doesn't sound like terminating at AWS. Also, the SPDY connection to AWS is secure which gets you a leg up on sites that aren't using SSL.

ryankshaw• 15 years ago

read the sentence right above that: "We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://example.com)." that means that the SSL is terminated at amazon's servers, they see it in plaintext, then they send it via SPDY (re-encrypted) to your device. so it is always secure over the wire, but is plaintext readable by amazon. if you are worried about what someone on the wire can see, you are good. if you are worried about what amazon can see, you're not.

mustpax3• 15 years ago

By terminate I mean Amazon's doing the SSL certificate verification on AWS and reestablishes a new connection (with SPDY) that they themselves sign. In this case, Amazon will be free to read and modify all data in flight, defeating the whole purpose of HTTPS.

"We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL."

metamatt3• 15 years ago

As others pointed out, that is at odds with the previous paragraph ("We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf").

Also, unless they stop doing the Silk combining thing entirely, I don't see how it's possible not to peer inside the requests. They can either pass along the traffic without knowing what it is (meaning they can't cache, or combine, requests or responses, because they don't know what's in those requests and responses), or they have to see inside.

This, to me, means they're taking liberties with the meaning of "direct connection" in the snippet you quoted, and, if I'm being pedantic, I don't see how the final sentence ("Any security provided ... would still exist") is literally true at all. Seems to me that being end to end, encrypted by a key only you and the other end, know, is a form of security that does not still exist in this architecture.

(Somewhat off topic, but when using earlier-generation Kindles with whispernet 3G, over 3G, all traffic is proxied through Amazon's datacenters, even for SSL, and I have no idea if it's secured end-to-end all the way to the device, or decrypted in Amazon's datacenter, and possibly re-encrypted to send OTA to the device. There's no way to tell.)

eslaught• 15 years ago

There are alternative browsers available:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_kk_1?rh=i%3Amobile-ap...

That doesn't fix the problem for unaware users, but at least the option to use other browsers still exists.

WoodyAnderson• 15 years ago

I work for a bank. If Silk does indeed terminate SSL, we will block this browser from accessing online banking. We block OperaMini browsers, which also terminate SSL, for exactly the same reason - your sign-on credentials will be IN THE CLEAR on a 3rd party site.

As the bank is the one offering the security guarantee and talking the risk, we cannot afford to have credentials in the clear on some else's site -- ever.

Silk, Fire and Another Loss For Privacy

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