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The New TransparencyESSAYS » Welcome to Deep Packet Inspection Canada
Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) equipment is intended to “identify the applications being used on the network, but some of these devices can go much further; those from a company like Narus, for instance, can look inside all traffic from a specific IP address, pick out the HTTP traffic, then drill even further down to capture only traffic headed to and from Gmail, and can even reassemble e-mails as they are typed out by the user.” Not all equipment is similarly developed and so some can drill down to reassemble e-mail, whereas others cannot. This website is meant to be the largest repository of publicly accessible information concerning the use of deep packet inspection in Canada, so that Canadians gain insight into how the technology is used by Canadian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and why they are using the technology.
Website Objectives
The website has five particular goals to achieve:
- To develop the largest publicly accessible repository of information concerning the use of DPI in Canada;
- To explain to Canadians in non-technical language whether and how their ISP uses DPI technologies;
- To provide regular analyses of current uses of DPI in Canada, as well as abroad when relevant;
- To facilitate discourse about DPI technologies amongst Canadians;
- To provide research and analyses of DPI technologies that could be used by government agencies, including privacy and information commissioners.
If we are to realize these goals, however, we require the assistance of interested vendors of the technology, ISP representative, members of provincial and federal governments, and most importantly from Canadian citizens. Most pressingly, while we have successfully gathered information on many of Canada’s largest ISPs we must still collate and make available information about Canada’s smaller ISPs and other service providers. We are depending on other Canadians to assist us in finding our blindspots and helping us correct them; this is a terribly large country with a rich set of service providers and the research team is unable to find them all!
Call for Assistance
In the upper left-hand corner of the website, there is a part of the website that is designed to identify what ISP you are visiting us from and then correlate that information with a database we have built. If we haven’t successfully identified your ISP you can help us by simply contacting us with the following information:
- Name of your ISP or host;
- Region where the ISP operates (or, alternately, the city/town/village where you receive service from the provider);
- A link to their webpage.
If you can provide the above information to us, we’ll do our best to learn whether or not the ISP or host uses DPI. A page will be created and we’ll note any successes or failures in getting information.
Made Possible By
This website, and the research associated with it, has been made possible because of funding received through the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s contributions program. The website will continue to be updated for at least the next two years, and will include regular updates in the resources, ISPs, and essay sections of the webpage, as well as revisions to our ISP detection system.
Interested in more? Subscribe to our RSS feed for new essays and site news as it comes available.
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9 Responses to “Welcome to Deep Packet Inspection Canada”
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If you have any questions regarding this website or our work, please contact us. DEEP PACKET INSPECTION CANADA by Christopher Parsons and Colin Bennet is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Canada License. Research, development, and maintenance of this website has been funded through the Office of the Privacy Commissioner's contributions program. Click here to see our Privacy Policy
You are collection personally identifiable information from contributors/participants. Where’s your privacy policy link?
Kinda ironic isn’t it – a site funded by the Privacy Commissioner not having an easily found and defined privacy policy. The word ‘Schadenfreude’ comes to mind at this time.
Post a reasonable privacy policy (ie. never disclose, etc…) and then perhaps you’ll get some more help.
It appears as though the new information in our footed wasn’t added correctly – which includes our privacy policy. This has since been corrected, and is available here: http://www.deeppacketinspection.ca/privacy-policy/
Thank-you for creating this site. It would be interesting to understand more about DPI activities conducted by other ISP’s besides the commercial ones. How about universities for example? What are their policies & practices for using packet shaping to manage network traffic flow within their domains?
Hi Mic,
Glad that you’re enjoying the site!
Stage three of the research (stage two is getting as many of the smaller commercial ISPs as we can into the database with credible information) will be canvassing the various universities to see what they’re doing. Ideally stage two will be done by the end of the summer – during which we’ll also be composing a listing of universities and colleges around Canada – and then get as much information about the universities and colleges into our the database ideally by December or so.
Great stuff my friend! Welcome to Deep Packet Inspection Canada Deep Packet Inspection was a wonderful read. Love reading stuff about this.
I just have a question, what if all communications are send it encrypted? DPI could go that deep? I’m pretty sure that next move for P2P application developers is go encrypted and i think they already did.
Hi Leo,
DPI can’t (at the moment) break encryption where the keys are kept private from the ISP (some businesses use DPI, and provide the encryption keys their employees use, to facilitate the analysis of corporate encrypted traffic). This said, it is possible to derive traffic type statistics based on a variety of factors; encrypting does not tend to hide that you are (for example) using Skype or a P2P service. Most P2P application developers have, indeed, moved towards encrypted communications but this masks content, not the type of traffic. Given that ISPs are aiming to deploy DPI at the moment because of traffic issues in Canada, there isn’t a need (or drive) for them to try to do anything that would undermine present encryption schemes.
Is it possible for DPI to gain access to info if we have all our sites hooked into HTTPS as Electronic Frontier is promoting?
DPI can analyze traffic in a variety of ways; encryption may prevent the actual analysis of content, but not necessarily they traffic-types that are passing across an ISP’s network.