The Clean Feed under the microscope

An industry veteran takes a look at Stephen Conroy's Internet Filtering scheme, and its impact on secure online transactions.

Ah, the Clean Feed.

Few things have generated as much discussion and, well, bile, as Stephen Conroy's pet project to put blinkers on Australian internet access and censor our browsing habits. It's caused a mess of strum and drang in our forums, and now, one industry veteran has had a long hard look at the scheme and put together a rather in depth discussion paper and report.

Ben McGinnes is a systems administrator and engineer with more than a decade of experience working in the Australian IT industry. Including at a major ISP and a major hardware and software vendor; he's also an old mate of mine, and after chatting about the current online state of play a little while ago, we realised he has a unique angle on the filtering process, one very much worth sharing. Thus, his 'Cleaning a HTTPS feed: A report on the filtering of the hypertext transfer protocol over transport layer security or secure socket connections'.

Here's an excerpt from the 16 page PDF:

"Should the Internet filtering system require Australian Internet users being unaware of the filtering taking place, as with a HTTPS proxy, and the HTTPS key escrow system being effectively infeasible, then the only remaining course of action would be to attempt to crack the encryption used by SSL or TLS connections. While it is theoretically possible to do this, the resources required for cracking even a single SSL or TLS stream are considerable."

In depth stuff, but frightfully important stuff nonetheless, so give it a read and get informed on another important angle on the debate.