[HamWAN PSDR] Holy smokes, we have Internet address space!
KL7WM at aol.com
KL7WM at aol.com
Thu Feb 21 22:52:42 PST 2013
I don't understand why you don't get it. It is LEGAL TO ORDER PIZZA ON
HAM RADIO unless you own or work for the pizza business. PERIOD.
If you are a pizza delivery driver you can't use amateur radio to get
direction to a customer.
We have swap net on amateur radio. We talk about money on the air. This
is OK TOO!
Daniel Stevens, KL7WM
In a message dated 2/20/2013 11:38:40 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,
cory at nq1e.hm writes:
It appears that we're getting our layers mixed up.
Phone patches to the pizza place are legitimate because the patching
system itself is run by a licensed control operator. In this case, the RF link
is layer 1 and the phone call is at least layer 3. The rules are for
governing who gets to use layer 1 and for what purpose. It would be totally
inappropriate for a pizza place to get a radio and camp on a frequency for the
purpose of accepting orders. However, contacting another ham and asking
them to order a pizza for you on their phone (or giving you an auto patch to
do it yourself) is appropriate because the RF portion is still ham-to-ham,
even if the message being relayed is not.
The same goes for "broadcasting". Your transmission must be intended for
one or more hams, even if the message must be relayed by them to reach its
final destination. If you knew the general public all had scanners tuned
to a ham frequency, it would not be appropriate to create your own radio
show meant for them.
Regarding AAA, I think we were also thinking about different layers.
Securing the configuration of a network device and providing "security" for a
network service (think SSL/TLS) is quite a bit different. I was referring to
the latter.
Using IPSec(AH) is a very good idea.
I have high hopes that this will all work out. It sounds like so much
fun, I can't contain myself! ;)
-Cory
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 9:55 PM, Bart Kus <_me at bartk.us_
(mailto:me at bartk.us) > wrote:
First of all, +1, Informative.
On 2/20/2013 11:22 AM, Cory (NQ1E) wrote:
It's not just optimization. We have serious restrictions on what type of
content can be moved over our RF links. Everyone who runs a device that
transmits is responsible for its operation. Luckily there is precedent here
since each node can be considered the same as a "digital packet repeater" in
historical context. In those cases, the repeater operator is not held
liable for illegal content relayed through them as long as they take
"reasonable measures" to limit it and when discovered, stop it.
While it's not preferable to get into the distributed firewall business,
it may be necessary if this network carries traffic to or from the internet.
If we had another "reasonable" way to make sure only licensed hams were
able to originate content on the network, firewalls likely wouldn't be
needed.
I think of the case of an audio repeater phone patch. A ham can call
someone via hammy spectrum, but the return voice traffic may not belong to a
ham. This has been allowed in the past as fair use.
Now if we tweak the scenario and say the phone call is originally inbound
from the repeater to the ham by a non-ham, but consists of content which
the ham (in control of hanging up) considers appropriate as per the hammy
rules of airwave content, should the conversation be allowed to continue? :)
My read on this is yes. 99% of the airtime will be the bidirectional
content of the conversation, just as it is in the outbound case. As long as
this content is in compliance with ham law, it ought not matter who sent the
original ring.
The next step in this line of thinking is to translate the concepts of the
analog telephone call to that of opening a digital inbound TCP session to
a ham server. It's up to the ham who is hosting the server to ensure that
the content of such conversations complies with ham rules. Hang up (TCP
RST) the session if the content goes outside the law. The role of HamWAN is
simply to facilitate the exchange of signals, and we're not held
responsible (as per voice repeater rules) should hams decide to break the rules of
content.
There is of course that little lingering issue of the initial unsolicited
ring in the analog world, or TCP SYN in the digital world making its way
onto hammy spectrum. I like to think HamWAN could even set some useful
precedent here, by delivering worthy use-cases, and perhaps cause an eventual
tweak to the official rules to allow for short control messages ("I would
like to talk") to be sent over hammy spectrum by non-hammies.
Another way of thinking about this inbound ring from non-hams is that
while the actual ring is received by ham equipment (repeater / digital
microwave router) on a non-hammy medium (telco / ISP network), the hammy RF
spectrum transmission from the repeater or digital microwave router is not a
signal relay, but rather a whole new communication, initiated by a ham-licensed
station (the repeater and its owner) to inform the target ham of the
presence of an inbound message on the non-hammy medium, and is therefore ham2ham
traffic after all!
We can do these legal mental gymnastics for a long time, but the bottom
line is unless someone actually complains and the FCC decides to care, we
should just go on and operate instead of shying away in fear. If the
practices are eventually ruled as illegal, we can cease such operations easily by
applying new firewall rules. I hope it does not come to that as it would
greatly stall the progress of digital ham radio.
In a somewhat related issue, there is also precedent for hams using
encrypted WiFi links with part 97 rules. Supposedly, it's only acceptable to
encrypt when the purpose is not to hide the content of your message. This
means that it's okay to run encryption as long you publish the decryption keys
so that they could be found by the public (negating the point of using
encryption in most cases).
Agreed, and I know of people who do this with P25 gear. But I don't see
any useful cases in which HamWAN could make use of encryption while
publishing the keys.
The frequencies that we're allowed to use as licensed radio amateurs
belong to the public and we're allowed to use them for the purposes of
experimentation and communication with other amateurs. In order to assure the fair
use of such a valuable resource, we have to follow strict rules that
prevent commercial interests from taking over. That's why we're not allowed to
conduct business on the air or communicate with the general public
(broadcast). That's also why it's important that anything transmitted is not
intentionally obfuscated from anyone else's ability to view it.
I see the _definition of broadcast_
(http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=ad552c047464dd8e611924492c5b41c6&rgn=div5&view=text&node=47:5.0.1.1
.6&idno=47#47:5.0.1.1.6.1.157.2) you cite there, and boy is that a weird
one. I'd counter this with my phone patch example, and cite the _ARRL
guidance_ (http://www.arrl.org/phone-patch-guidelines) on the matter, which
allow communication with non-amateur third parties (is that the same as
"general public"?). In fact, the ARRL guidance counters what has been said
about commercial communications in a previous thread:
Calls to place an order for a commercial product may be made such as the
proverbial call to the pizza restaurant to order food, but not calls to
one's office to receive or to leave business messages since communications on
behalf of ones employer are not permitted.
The ARRL guidance on reverse autopatch (inbound TCP) actually runs counter
to my views on the subject. In part, it states:
Incoming calls to an autopatch must be answered and screened off the air
by the control operator to ensure rule compliance. If an incoming call
automatically causes the repeater to transmit, even if it's just a signal tone
or notification message, then it is possible for an unlicensed person to
initiate a transmission without the control operator's knowledge or approval,
which is not permitted.
This to me sounds like we absolutely need a ham-controlled edge firewall
mechanism to "screen the calls off the air" as per the individual hams'
specifications.
One thing is for sure: we're in brand new territory. We need to tread
with the utmost character so we set a good example for others who follow us.
As a long-time computer engineer with a strong emphasis on security, the
idea of having such an open network is very scary to me. However, it's also
why I'm excited about the challenge. When most people think about
security, they only think about secrecy (hiding your messages). However, security
also includes authentication (making sure messages really come from the
intended sender) and integrity (has this message been altered in transit).
With those two aspects and a lot of help from public key cryptography, my
hope is to contribute to making a network that is both open *and* secure.
I've already made some strides in this area for other ham-related projects
of mine, and now I'm hoping to translate that to the needs of the overall
network.
This is exactly right. Well, almost. :) Cisco's thinking gets it right
when they refer to AAA: Authentication, Authorization and Accounting. For
anyone unfamiliar with what these concepts mean exactly, can _refer to this
page_
(http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/12_2/security/configuration/guide/scfaaa.html#wp1000889) . Also Wikipedia has a _page on AAA_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_protocol) . The additional point you make about
Integrity may not necessarily fall under the "Authentication" concept, since
that deals more with actors in a network rather than the non-molestation of
their messages, but can be served nicely by an implementation of _IPSec in AH
mode_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipsec#Authentication_Header) .
Tons of work here for sure, after the lower layers of the network (RF) are
up and running.
--Bart
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:16 AM, Bart Kus <_me at bartk.us_
(mailto:me at bartk.us) > wrote:
It's just a little more efficient to stop unwanted traffic early, before
it takes up a bunch of airtime. Just an optimization, which may not be
worth the complexity right up front. Your suggestion works too.
--Bart
On 2/19/2013 8:46 PM, Benjamin Krueger wrote:
Just saw this, "just needs to push an ACL update". Why can't we just route
all traffic and let the client nodes run their own firewalls? We *really*
don't want to be in the distributed firewall business. :)
On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 4:04 PM, Bart Kus <_me at bartk.us_
(mailto:me at bartk.us) > wrote:
Global reachability is not in conflict with autonomy. Achieving both
simultaneously just requires careful design of HamWAN network services. If the
HamWAN internet feed drops off, the routing, DNS and other services need
to continue working. The first word in ASN is Autonomous after all. :)
I consider NAT and Proxies as old crusty hacks from the age of ISPs giving
out just 1 IP/customer. It's time to put these ideas to rest. IPv6 will
do this on the commercial internet in the coming years, and AMPRnet will
allow us to do it immediately here. For the cases where communication is to
be restricted due to user preference, we can push filtering rules to
firewalls at the edges of the network, and at the HamWAN <-> user site
interface. In short, firewalls: yes, nat+gateways: no.
If a user wants to make a service running on one of his servers public, he
just needs to push an ACL update to HamWAN and it'll be opened up. No
need to re-IP, update DNS, change NICs, whatever else. And most importantly,
it makes everyone equal. Your subnet allocation has the same powers as
mine. There is no special ground to fight over, such as space on a public
subnet, or access to some officially sanctioned gateway servers that are
allowed to do special things.
If you want though, you can of course live in the world of private IPs and
NAT. Just configure your LAN router that way.
Complete freedom of configuration. This is the way the internet should
have evolved for geeks!
--Bart
On 2/13/2013 8:30 AM, Cory (NQ1E) wrote:
Unless I've misunderstood the point of this network all together, there
shouldn't be a case where we want the entire network address space to be
reachable from the global internet. It's much more likely that the network will
remain as autonomous as possible and any connections to the internet will
be for connecting specific services through a gateway of some sort.
A subnet of at least /23 (typical minimum for global BGP announcements)
should be reserved for the purpose of being globally routable in the future,
if/when HamWAN decides to peer with one or more ISPs. An address in the
/23 can be given to each service gateway for connecting to the internet.
The rest of the 44-net allocation can be treated as private address space,
except that it's essentially guaranteed not to cause conflicts with the
user-level networks since it's still globally unique.
On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 2:28 AM, Bart Kus <_me at bartk.us_
(mailto:me at bartk.us) > wrote:
Clever ;)
What if HamWAN switches ISPs? All that IPv6 space would need to be given
up. It can't follow you AFAIK. Or the ISP may charge whatever they feel
like to let you take it with you. Also bad.
The fees for IPv6 are not as low as I had hoped, but not as high as you
think either! There's a 25% discount in effect for "extra-small"
allocations (which are still larger than the entire IPv4 internet). The cost looks
to be $937.50/yr. Not sure it's worth the cost, given the IPv4 AMPRnet
situation. We can very likely just expand our AMPRnet allocation if we
out-grow the /20.
--Bart
On 2/13/2013 1:10 AM, Cory (NQ1E) wrote:
Here's an IPv6 allocation for you ;)
::ffff:_44.24.240.0/116_ (http://44.24.240.0/116)
With the obvious exception of AMPRNet addresses for amateur radio use, IP
allocations should come from an ISP. Obtaining a direct allocation from
ARIN would cost around a couple grand per year.
On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 12:46 AM, Bart Kus <_me at bartk.us_
(mailto:me at bartk.us) > wrote:
Result: APPROVED
Your allocated subnet is: _44.24.240.0 / 20_ (tel:44.24.240.0%20/%2020)
_https://portal.ampr.org/networks.php?a=region&id=191_
(https://portal.ampr.org/networks.php?a=region&id=191)
HamWAN now has 4096 real Internet IPs to play with. Next up: we gotta
crack the mystery of getting IPv6 net space. Any volunteers? :)
What an incredibly productive day,
--Bart
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--
Benjamin
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