MLAT.is: MLAT treaty cartel internet and network overlay for Digital Traffic analytics

摘要

The global nature of Internet communications has expanded the challenge of defining both legal jurisdiction and trust. Internet traffic may pass through numerous countries on its path between network source and destination. This can create trust and legal challenges for privacy and surveillance for users of the Internet. Establishing and capturing trust in network elements can mitigate attacks by adversaries. In this paper, we introduce such a trust network, Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties, or MLATs. We further introduce www.MLAT.is, a novel web-based service, database and digital analytics tool focusing on MLATs and global Internet routing, while providing multiple levels of capabilities. In the digital age, MLATs, treaties between sovereign nations to cooperate in criminal investigations, including surveillance, have taken on new criticality. As cross-border and digital crime has proliferated, so, by necessity, have investigations. Countries increasingly use MLATs to pursue criminals operating outside their borders. MLAT.is is the first flexible, scalable service, database and digital analytics tool providing accurate predictions of treaty partner cooperating jurisdictions for Internet routing and path selection algorithms and other purposes. It builds a structural model of all world jurisdictions. It constructs the first comprehensive, up-to-date, reliable annotated map of world jurisdictions by criminal investigation treaty partners. It allows us to accurately and efficiently predict the effects of MLATs on path selection risk between arbitrary Internet hosts. We have applied the MLAT.is service to representative communications resources and services in use today, including undersea cables, anonymous network communications like Tor, and Autonomous Systems (ASes). In each case, we observe that using MLAT.is's novel predictions and measurements extend existing capabilities and lead to a significant improvement in end user effectiveness. In this paper, we introduce MLAT.is and describe it in detail for the first time.