When I read about Telex, a research project aimed at making it easier to get past Internet censorship, my “split personality” – lover of freedom and justice versus corporate security guy kicked in right away. You see, if widely implemented, Telex would make it much easier and safer for people living under repressive regimes to get past said regimes’ censorship of the Internets. Built on client software, some clever crypto in packet headers and servers hosted by friendly ISPs, Telex would turn the idea of a proxy server inside out, effectively making the entire Internet (it’s a series of tubes, you know) one big proxy.
This would be really great – I would love to see the US government as well as non profit organizations host Telex servers to allow people in China, the middle east, and other places where freedom of expression is curtailed… however, Telex would also make my job as a security professional that much more difficult. By installing a Telex client, the users on my corporate network might be able to bypass the web filtering we have put in place. While some of that filtering is aimed at keeping people away from “non work appropriate sites,” there are other reasons to filter Internet access in the workplace as well. For example, we block access to sites known to host malware. We block access to sites which would put us in violation of various legal and regulatory mandates. These are all legitimate things to do in a corporate environment, and our employees have unfettered access to the Internet outside of the office. Employees using a system like Telex would put our company at risk.
Telex is stil in the proof of concept stage and there needs to be a lot more software and infrastructure development done before it can be a reality on a large scale. As I said, I am 1000% pro Telex as a tool for people to bypass repressive regimes’ Internet censorship. But I think that corporate Internet censorship (hate that word) is another kettle of fish altogether and we security professionals need to keep an eye on Telex and similar technologies. I feel like I should be dressing like these guys after writing this…
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