Deep Packet Inspection Concerns

There are numerous reasons for service providers to engage in deep packet inspection — the practice of analyzing packets and understanding what type of data is contained therein. One simple reason to do this is to prioritize certain types of traffic that should be of higher priority.

Be that as it may, many are concerned about this practice and furthermore are not fond of having their service providers know everything they do online.

This argument can’t easily be separated from that of net neutrality and specifically in a  recent case where Comcast was found to be slowing BitTorrent traffic.

[Washington Post]

  • Tarek Amr
    April 20, 2008 at 2:40 am

    The point is that many of those VoIP Softwares (such as Skype) encrypt their traffic. So, DPI won’t be useful in this case.
    PaloAlto Networks use Proxys and techniques similar to Man In The Middle attack in order to decrypt the traffic and be able to identify VoIP calls and block them, but I am not sure if this is the right way to do it, and if it really works or not.

  • Rich Tehrani
    April 20, 2008 at 11:26 am

    Certainly you raise a great point about encryption and DPI. I will certainlty be covering this area more in the future. Thanks for writing.

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