Finally, the captures were taken over the course of hours - whereas the IPB will be months, if not years until it's repealed or struck down - so they will be able to observe and infer patterns that my limited test cannot.

I'm hardly likely to search for goat porn when I know a packet capture is running - none-the-less I tried to keep my habits as normal as possible.

There is also, of course, always going to be some selection bias.For the average user, the situation is probably notably worse. What that means, is that, the results below come from a network which should be reasonably well controlled in terms of what makes it onto the wire in cleartext.I also block a lot of advertising domains, and most outgoing HTTP connections are routed via a caching proxy, so my request fingerprint will differ from the average.Some connections are automatically routed out via VPN's, others via Tor, but (at time of writing) I still allow other connections to go directly via my ISP. I'm under no illusions that my home network is anything like the 'average' internet user.I've constrained the data in this post to that generated by using simple extraction techniques - by performing more advanced processing of the captures I was able to correlate information in order to reach additional conclusions, but to keep the technical barrier to understanding this post low, I've omitted that information. Where there was something that struck me as likely to generate interesting traffic, I made a note of the time as a reminder to look at it later. So the data collected is what would be seen downstream at the ISP's recording system (or, in fact, if Mass Equipment Interference led to my ISP provided router being compromised).Ĭaptures were taken when I was the only person home, so the traffic I captured was either generated by my activities, or from one of the systems I run.Ĭaptures were started, and then I simply went about my business as usual (for example: running a security audit on a server, followed by a browse of the news).

I took a number of packet captures, all at the internet facing interface of my firewall. Most of the results were exactly what I expected, but I think describing them explicitly is probably more helpful than not - to that end, I've tried to keep the language as accessible as possible, as those who understand how tech works at the network level are unlikely to find much of surprise here. The intention of this post is not simply to repeat those, but to provide a practical demonstration of exactly the kind of information that the proposed powers would compel your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to record.Īs well as demonstrating what an ISP would soon be collecting (and how simple it is to extract), we'll look at the issues the IPB presents in the context of the information we've extracted.Īs the IPB isn't exactly explicit about exactly what it allows, especially in terms of techniques, I've made some assumptions (though I believe their fair and reasonable). There have been numerous write-ups of the threat that the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill poses to our privacy and security.

Dropsync tasker