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305
Part 2
Lecture Notes of the Institute
for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics
and Telecommunications Engineering 305
123
Editors
Songqing Chen Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo
George Mason University The University of Texas at San Antonio
Fairfax, VA, USA San Antonio, TX, USA
Xinwen Fu Wenjing Lou
Boston University Virginia Tech
Lowell, MA, USA Blacksburg, VA, USA
Aziz Mohaisen
University of Central Florida
Orlando, FL, USA
© ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2019
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the
material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
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does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
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The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are
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Preface
Steering Committee
Imrich Chlamtac University of Trento, Italy
Guofei Gu Texas A&M University, USA
Peng Liu Pennsylvania State University, USA
Sencun Zhu Pennsylvania State University, USA
Organizing Committee
General Chairs
Xinwen Fu University of Central Florida, USA
Kim-Kwang Raymond The University of Texas at San Antonio, USA
Choo
Local Chairs
Clay Posey University of Central Florida, USA
Cliff C. Zou University of Central Florida, USA
Workshops Chairs
Kaiqi Xiong University of South Florida, USA
Liang Xiao Xiamen University, China
Publications Chairs
Songqing Chen George Mason University, USA
Houbing Song Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, USA
viii Organization
Web Chairs
Bryan Pearson University of Central Florida, USA
Yue Zhang University of Central Florida, USA
Panels Chairs
Simon (Xinming) Ou University of South Florida, USA
Craig A. Shue Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA
Demos Chair
Song Han University of Connecticut, USA
Tutorials Chair
Yong Guan Iowa State University, USA
Deep Analytics
Systematic Theory
Bulletproof Defenses
Power Analysis and Protection on SPECK and Its Application in IoT . . . . . . 350
Jing Ge, An Wang, Liehuang Zhu, Xin Liu, Ning Shang,
and Guoshuang Zhang
Better Clouds
ATCS Workshop
Blockchains
Internet of Things
Catching Malware
Machine Learning
Communicating Covertly
Kun Du1 , Hao Yang1 , Zhou Li2 , Haixin Duan3(B) , Shuang Hao4 , Baojun Liu1 ,
Yuxiao Ye1,4 , Mingxuan Liu1 , Xiaodong Su4 , Guang Liu4 , Zhifeng Geng4 ,
Zaifeng Zhang5 , and Jinjin Liang5
1
Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
{dk15,yang-h16,lbj15,liumx18}@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn
2
University of California, Irvine, USA
zhou.li@uci.edu
3
Tsinghua University, Beijing National Research Center
for Information Science and Technology, Beijing, China
duanhx@tsinghua.edu.cn
4
University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, USA
shao@utdallas.edu, yeyuxiao@outlook.com,
suxiaodong.sxd@gmail.com, lg2001607@163.com, zhifeng.geng@qq.com
5
Network security Research Lab at Qihoo 360, Beijing, China
zhangzaifeng@360.cn, liangjinjin@360.cn
c ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2019
Published by Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019. All Rights Reserved
S. Chen et al. (Eds.): SecureComm 2019, LNICST 305, pp. 3–25, 2019.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37231-6_1
4 K. Du et al.
1 Introduction
Fast-paced reading is favored in the Internet age. Lengthy articles are less likely
to be read and often receive comments like TL;DR (short for Too long; didn’t
read ) [1]. While impatience to long text may leave valuable information over-
looked, negligence to a long domain name can lead to much worse consequences.
As a real-world example, Fig. 1 shows a phishing website with a long
domain name, mails.tsinghua.edu.cn.locale.rebornplasticsurgery.com, displayed
in IE browser’s address bar with default settings. The domain name is so lengthy
that only the subdomain mails.tsinghua.edu.cn can be displayed, which is identical
to the authentic login domain name of Tsinghua university. A user can be deceived
to put her login credential when visiting this website.
(1) We find a new type of attack that impersonates search engines. For example,
the domain www.baidu.com.baidu-service.com has identical appearance as
Baidu and it can even returns meaningful search results when being queried.
The goal of adversaries here is to insert illegal ads, e.g., gamble promotions,
in the returned results. In total, we find 13,331 fake search-engine websites.
We report them to Baidu security team, and all of them have been confirmed
malicious.
(2) While a levelsquatting domain can be created by adding a subdomain record
into the DNS zone file, we find wildcard DNS record is used more often
for management ease: 517,839 (63.33%) levelsquatting FQDNs (fully quali-
fied domain names referring to absolute domain names) or 41,389 (64.55%)
e2LDs have wildcard DNS records.
(3) The effectiveness of blacklists regarding levelsquatting is very limited. We
check the identified levelsquatting domains on PhishTank1 and VirusTotal2 .
Only around 4% of the them have been captured by VirusTotal and Phish-
Tank respectively.
(4) We conjecture that the rise of levelsquatting attack is attributed to the
problematic design of modern browsers. In fact, we investigate and show
that some mobile browsers (e.g., Firefox and UC) and desktop browsers
(e.g., Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7) fail to display levelsquatting FQDNs
correctly, making users vulnerable to this fraud. As a result, we suggest these
browser manufacturers to adjust their UI and highlight the e2LD section.
(1) We perform the first large-scale study of levelsquatting fraud using a detec-
tion system LDS we developed.
1
https://www.phishtank.com/.
2
https://www.virustotal.com/.
6 K. Du et al.
2 Background
In this section, we first give a brief overview of existing methods for subdomain
creation. Then we define levelsquatting and describe the scope of this study.
Finally, we survey existing attacks against brand names that have been exten-
sively studied and compare them with levelsquatting.
Subdomain Creation. In this work, we consider a domain name as FQDN,
its right part offered by registrar (e.g., GoDaddy3 ) as e2LD and its left part as
subdomain. To learn whether a domain is managed by a registrar, we check if it is
one level under an effective top-level domain (eTLD) (e.g., .com and .co.uk)4 ,
an approach commonly used by existing works [4].
There are three types of DNS records that can create subdomain, A, AAAA and
CNAME records. The first two associate a subdomain with an IP v4/v6 address,
e.g., <b.example.com A 93.184.216.34>. CNAME specifies the alias of
another canonical domain, e.g., <www.example.com CNAME example.com>.
Additionally, the owner can specify a wildcard record, by filling the subdomain
part with a character *, which will capture DNS requests to any subdomain not
specified in the zone file.
Levelsquatting. A registrar usually enforces no extra restriction on subdomain
creation, if the whole domain name complies with the IETF standard [5]. Such
loose policy unfortunately allows attackers to create a subdomain impersonat-
ing a well-known brand without any hurdle. We name such fraud domains as
levelsquatting domains. More concretely, it contains a well-known brand (e.g.,
google.com) in its subdomain section, while the e2LD section does not belong
to the brand owner.
Whether a domain is created for levelsquatting depends on its similarity to
a known brand in both its subdomain and e2LD sections. For the subdomain
section, we assume attackers: (1) use the exact brand name without any typo
(e.g., go0gle.com.example.com is excluded); (2) keep the entire e2LD section
of the targeted brand within the subdomain section (e.g., google.example.com
is excluded); (3) target a brand’s FQDN as well in addition to its e2LD
(e.g., accounts.google.com.example.com is included). We choose these criteria
to reduce the computation overhead (e.g., finding all brand typos is computa-
tionally expensive) while achieve good coverage.
Comparison to Domain-Squatting. Previous studies have revealed many
tricks adopted by adversaries to impersonate a brand. Domain-squatting is
3
https://www.godaddy.com/.
4
We use the public suffix list provided by https://publicsuffix.org/ to match eTLD.
TL;DR Hazard: A Comprehensive Study of Levelsquatting Scams 7
Fig. 2. Processing flow of LDS. The number in the figure refers to the number of records
remained after each filtering step.
arguably the most popular approach. In this approach, adversaries buy an e2LD
that looks similar to a brand domain and fool users who cannot distinguish
the difference. This can be done through typo-squatting [6], bit-squatting [7],
homophone-squatting [8], homograph-squatting [9] and etc. A recent work by
Kintis et al. covers combo-squatting, in which case attackers combine brand
name with one or more phrases (e.g., youtube-live.com) and register the
e2LD [10]. Despite the high similarity, these approaches will fail if the user is
careful enough when reviewing the domain name.
However, a recent attack called punycode scam takes one step further to erase
the visual difference. Punycode is a way to represent a Unicode letter using ASCII
character set. But many Unicode letters look almost the same as ASCII letters
(e.g., Cyrillic “a” and Latin “a”). They can be abused to construct scam domains
looking exactly the same as brand domains [11,12].
All approaches listed above require attackers to buy e2LDs similar to the
targeted brand. The monetary cost is still non-negligible and the choices are
usually limited. In comparison, creating levelsquatting domain needs virtually
zero cost and the choices are unlimited. Moreover, when the domain is displayed
in a defective browser, discerning the difference is much more difficult.
4 Evaluation
The Precision of LDS. LDS detects 817,681 levelsquatting FQDNs (DomLD )
and we want to learn how accurate the result is. In the beginning, we use “query”
9
We are not able to obtain WHOIS records for all e2LDs within DomSus because
they have become expired when we queried.
10
https://github.com/TeamHG-Memex/page-compare.
11
https://www.seleniumhq.org/.
12
https://scikit-image.org/.
10 K. Du et al.
mode of VirusTotal API13 to get URL report for every detected levelsquatting
FQDN and use the number of alarms to determine whether it is scam. But it
turns out that most of the domains are not even been submitted to VirusTotal
(more details in Sect. 5.2). Therefore, we have to resort to manual verification.
However, manually confirming all of them within a reasonable time is impossible.
As an alternative, we sample FQDNs randomly and validate them for 10 rounds.
We calculate precision rate for each round and consider the average value as the
true precision rate.
In each round, we first sample 1,000 results and check whether the FQDN is
used for phishing, e.g., stealing login credentials. For the remaining ones, our val-
idation rules focus on the strategies adopted by attackers. In particular, we first
compare two pages crawled by common browser user-agent and spider user-agent
strings, determining if cloaking performed, which is widely used for Blackhat
SEO. Then we follow the method proposed by Wang et al. [17] to find cloaking
pages: if there is no similarity in visual effect or page structures between two
pages, the domain is labeled as cloaking. Next, we go through the page content
and check if it is used to promote illegal business like porn, gamble or fake shops.
We also examine e2LD’s WHOIS information and consider it a true positive
when the domain is recently registered by a non-authoritative party. After 10
rounds calculation, we get the system precision rate is 96.9%.
Analysis of False Positives. We conservatively treat the false positives rate
3.1%. But a close look suggests none of them is absolutely innocent. Among these
310 domains, 178 of them show regional news, but none of their sources are well
known and the same content/page structure are found, which indicate they might
serve spun content for spam purposes [18]. The other 132 domains all display a
message showing that the domain is expired. However, when we revisited them
one month later, 118 of them showed more than 2 ads about lottery and porn.
We speculate these domains might be purchased later by attackers or just use
expired pages occasionally to avoid detection.
5 Measurement
In this section, we present our analysis about levelsquatting domains. We first
describe the dataset we use. Then, we evaluate how effective the current defense
stands against levelsquatting and how popular levelsquatting is used for scam
activities. Next we examine the statistics of the lexical features, including the
popularity of different prefixes in subdomains. Finally, we take a deep look into
the infrastructure behind levelsquatting domains.
5.1 Datasets
To enrich the diversity of the levelsquatting domains, in addition to the 799,893
domains captured by LDS, we also acquire data from PhishTank and VirusTotal.
The summary is listed in Table 1.
13
The “query” mode retrieves the prior scanning result of a URL that has been sub-
mitted to VirusTotal by another user.
TL;DR Hazard: A Comprehensive Study of Levelsquatting Scams 11
most frequently (79,338 or 9.70% of DSAll ). The top 15 prefixes show up 31.09%
of all levelsquatting domains. Prefix known to be associated with mobile services,
like m., 3g. and weixin. (representing WeChat, the top mobile chat app in
China), are ranked highly, suggesting that attackers actively exploit the display
vulnerabilities in mobile devices (discussed in Sect. 7).
5.3 Infrastructure
Levelsquatting domains serve as the gateway to attackers’ infrastructure. For
better understanding, we first look into the IP addresses and registrants behind,
then we analyze domains with wildcard DNS record, distribution in new gTLD
and HTTPS certificates they deployed.
IP Addresses. We performed DNS queries on all levelsquatting FQDNs in
DSAll to obtain their IP addresses by using pydig14 . In total, 710,347 (86.87%)
requests returned valid results and 54,118 IPs were obtained. We show the top
10 IP addresses that levelsquatting domains prefer in Table 2. From this table
we can see that the top 10 servers host more than 38% of total levelsquatting
domains.
Registrants. We are interested in who actually control the levelsquatting
domains. Hence we select WHOIS records of domains in DSAll and obtain 58,372
valid records in total. By grouping the domains with registrant email addresses,
we find that 23.41% of them are under 10 email addresses. We list these regis-
trants in Table 3. We search email addresses for relevant information, find that
14
https://github.com/shuque/pydig.
TL;DR Hazard: A Comprehensive Study of Levelsquatting Scams 13
many of them belong to professional domain brokers who own massive amount
of domains. Similar observations were also described in previous works looking
into the underground economy [3] and blackhat SEO [15].
Registration Dates. Next, we examine the registration dates of the levelsquat-
ting e2LDs. Figure 4 illustrates the ECDF of registration dates, which shows
that more than 59.27% of domains were registered after 2016. Previous studies
suggest recent registration date is an indicator of domains owned by attack-
ers [21,22], and our result suggests that hijacking reputable e2LD and adding
subdomains under its zone file are not popular, since reputable e2LDs tend to
14 K. Du et al.
have a long registration lifetime (e.g., google.com has been registered for more
than 20 years). Instead, creating e2LD or compromising newly registered e2LD
is more popular.
Wildcard DNS. While LDS has detected 817,681 unique levelsquatting FQDNs,
they are mapped to only 64,124 e2LDs. We suspect there may be many
wildcard DNS records among them. To verify this assessment, we probe all
64,124 e2LDs using the same method proposed by Du et al. [15]. In essence,
for an e2LD like example.com, we first try to resolve the IP address of
*.example.com. The e2LD is considered to support wildcard DNS if there
is a valid response. Otherwise, we issue two queries with random subdomain
names, like aaa.example.com and bbb.example.com. If the two responses
TL;DR Hazard: A Comprehensive Study of Levelsquatting Scams 15
are matched, the e2LD is considered to support wildcard DNS as well. In the end,
we discovered 41,389 e2LDs (64.55% of 64,124) contain wildcard DNS records,
suggesting this configuration is widely used by adversaries.
Abuse of New gTLD Domains. Previous studies [15] discovered that there is
an increasing tendency of registering malicious domains under new gTLDs, like
.top. We want to learn whether new gTLD is also favored by levelsquatting
attackers. As such, we use the new gTLD list published by ICANN [23] to filter
the e2LDs in DSAll . It turns out a prominent ratio of e2LDs (17,716, 27.63% of
64,124) are under new gTLDs, which aligns with the discovery of previous works.
We think the the major reason is that most new gTLDs are cheap and lack of
maintenance. We show the top 10 new gTLDs abused in Table 4.
SSL Certificates. Deploying SSL certificates and supporting HTTPs connec-
tion is a growing trend for site administrators. To make malicious sites, espe-
cially phishing sites more convincing to visitors, SSL certificates are also used by
attackers [24]. For levelsquatting domains, the motivation is the same but our
measurement result shows that they have not seriously considered this option.
We ran port scan with ZMap15 over all DSAll and find that only 587 of them
provide certificates. By comparison, a study [25] showed that already 70% of
Alexa Top One Million sites provide SSL certificates. We download all these 587
certifications and extracted the issuers. Only six issuers are found. All of them
can provide free SSL certification with 30-day period or even longer. We believe
this is the main reason that these issuers are selected (Table 5).
6 Characterization
In this section, we take a closer look into the business behind levelsquatting
domains and their targeted brands, to get a better understanding of how they
serve attackers’ operations.
15
https://github.com/zmap/zmap.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
mills and paper mills, has a match factory that is among the largest
in the world. These industries are run by water-power. Ottawa is at
the head of navigation of the Ottawa River, which here is broken by
the Chaudière Falls. When Champlain saw these falls the tumbling
waters presented a beautiful spectacle. Now they are reduced and
obscured by mills and power stations. There is about two million
horse-power available within fifty miles, one twentieth of which is
developed.
Many of the industries based on the water-powers and the
lumber of the Ottawa district are in Hull, across the river. Hull has
about thirty thousand people, nearly all French Canadians. Its
population is temporarily increased each evening, as streams of
Ottawans cross the bridges from the bone dry province of Ontario to
the beer and wine cafés of the adjoining territory.
To appreciate all the beauties of the capital one must ride over
its thirty miles of boulevards and park drives. The Rideau Canal
flows through the heart of the city, giving a picturesque appearance
to its business districts, and lending a delightful aspect to the streets
and homes in the residential sections. There are block after block of
attractive houses that have the canal at their front doors, and others
with the canal in the rear. I noticed more than one canoe moored, so
to speak, in a backyard.
Indeed, the city seems entirely surrounded by water and parks.
Besides the Rideau Canal, there is the river of the same name, with
well-kept parks along its banks. The most commanding sites on the
hillsides overlooking the rivers are occupied by fine public buildings
and millionaires’ residences. There are numerous yacht and canoe
clubs, while on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, above the
Chaudière Falls, are several golf courses. In their clubs the
Canadians seem to be content to do things on a less elaborate scale
than is common in the States, thus making it possible for men and
women of moderate means to belong without feeling extravagant. In
fact, though none know better than the Canadians how to entertain
elaborately whenever they choose to do so, they live more simply
than we, and spend more time in outdoor recreations.
Imagine yourself at my side as I write these words, and look with
me out of my hotel window. We are in the Château Laurier, a modern
hotel built of light-coloured stone in the design of a French chateau.
It was erected by the Grand Trunk Railroad, but now, like the
railroad, is operated by the government. It faces Connaught Square,
opposite the Union Station, with which it is connected by an
underground passage.
If we were to fall from our window, we should land on the bank of
the Rideau Canal as it comes out from under Connaught Square.
The canal divides Ottawa into two parts. East of the canal is Lower
Town, where most of the French residents live. To the east also is
Sandy Hill, a fine residential quarter. Just below us the canal
descends through a ravine down to the level of the Ottawa River.
Here there are six locks forming a water stairway. The canal
connects the Ottawa River with Kingston, on Lake Ontario. It was
constructed chiefly for military purposes. After the War of 1812, the
Canadians felt that they needed an inland waterway between
Montreal and the Lakes that would not be exposed to attack from the
American side. For many years Ottawa bore the name of Bytown,
after a military engineer, Colonel By, who built the canal.
Now look across the ravine through which the canal drops down
to the river. There are the government buildings, arranged in a
quadrangle. They are massive structures of rough stone and Gothic
architecture that crown the bluff one hundred and sixty feet above
the water. They look more like one of our universities than any of our
capitols. The Parliament building, with its back to the river, forms one
side of the quadrangle. In front of it are several acres of lawn that
slope gently down to Wellington Street. Facing the Parliament
building are other government offices, business buildings, and the
white marble home of the Rideau Club, where politicians from all
Canada gather during the legislative sessions.
The government has bought several city blocks near the
Parliament quadrangle, on which it will some day erect appropriate
structures to house its various departments. Some of them,
meanwhile, are accommodated in all sorts of office buildings and
remodelled dwellings, a condition that also reminds me of
Washington. This fact shows, too, that in the face of the continual cry
for greater economy the government machine in Canada is, like our
own, getting bigger every year.
The present Parliament house is a new building that will have
cost, when complete, nearly twelve million dollars. It is on the site
and about the size of the one burned in 1916, except that it has one
story more, and its square Gothic tower will be within two feet as
high as the dome of the United States Capitol. The entrance hall,
which forms the base of this tower, is a veritable forest of pillars that
uphold Gothic arches. The arches and walls have a dappled gray-
white appearance, due to fossils in the Selkirk limestone. Arched
corridors lead to the Senate wing on the right, to the House of
Commons on the left, and straight ahead into the library, the only
part of the original building not destroyed by the fire.
I found the Senate chamber a beautiful room, handsomely
appointed. Its walls are lined with large paintings of Canadian troops
in action in the World War. The ninety-six senators who represent the
various provinces are appointed for life by the government in power
whenever vacancies occur. Seats in this body are often handed out
as political plums. The Canadian Senate has not nearly as much
power in national affairs as the upper house of our Congress, but a
seat in it means both honour and a living.
The House of Commons, the real arena of Canadian political life,
is a long, high-ceilinged room, with a broad aisle extending from the
door to the speaker’s dais. On each side of the aisle are rows of
double desks behind which sit the two hundred and thirty-five
members. Those belonging to the majority party are on the speaker’s
right, and those of the opposition on his left. The speaker’s big chair
is patterned after the one in the English House of Commons. I sat in
it and found it very uncomfortable. Above it is the coat of arms of
Canada, carved in wood from Westminster six hundred years old. All
around the chamber are galleries for visitors.
The members of the Canadian Congress are not as generously
provided for as ours. They get salaries of four thousand dollars a
year, with nothing extra for secretaries. Instead of cash mileage
allowances they receive railroad passes. The Parliament must meet
every year, and the sessions usually last from early in January until
May or June. Because of the tendency of members to go home
before the adjournment, the House passed a law imposing fines of
twenty-five dollars a day for absences during the final two weeks.
Our Congress might do well to enact a similar law.
Yesterday morning I drove out to Rideau Hall, a big gray stone
mansion in park-like grounds overlooking the Rideau and Ottawa
rivers. It is the residence of the Governor-General of Canada, the
representative of His Majesty, the King of Great Britain, and the
nominal head of the Canadian government. The Canadians pay him
a princely salary, furnish him this palatial country residence, and
make him a generous allowance for entertainment and travel. They
sincerely desire that he enjoy his five years among them, provided
that he does not interfere in the conduct of their affairs.
“Just consider,” said a Canadian statesman to me to-day, “that
the position of the Governor-General in Canada is identical with that
of the King in Great Britain. He is a symbol of the unity and continuity
of the empire, but his executive duties are purely formal, as he must
not take the initiative and must always get the advice of his
ministers. Control of the government may shift from one party to
another here as in England, but the Governor-General, like the King,
continues undisturbed in his office. When his term expires the King
names his successor, but no government in London dreams of
making the appointment until it has consulted with Ottawa and
ascertained that the man chosen is acceptable to us.”
The speaker was a man who has frequently held high offices in
the government. Like other Canadians I have met, he believes his
country has a more democratic form of government than that of the
United States.
“You know,” said he, “we in Canada marvel at the strange
spectacle you sometimes have in Washington of a president of one
party confronted by a majority in Congress of another party. To us,
responsible popular government under such conditions is
unthinkable. The majority in the House of Commons always forms
our government, or administration, as you call it, and the majority
leader becomes premier and head of the cabinet. As long as it is
supported by a majority of that house, the cabinet is the supreme
power of the land in federal affairs. As soon as it ceases to be
supported by the majority, it loses the right to govern and a new
ministry comes in. Under our system an election must be held every
five years, but it may be held oftener. For example, a prime minister
who has met defeat in the Commons may advise a dissolution of
Parliament and appeal at once to the people in a general election.
You Americans vote by the calendar, every two or four years; we
vote on specific issues as the need arises. Every one of our cabinet
ministers is an elected member of the House of Commons or a
member of the Senate, and must answer for all his official acts on
the floor of the House.”
I asked as to the present attitude toward the United States.
“It seems to me,” was the reply, “the relations between Canada
and the United States were never better than they are to-day. The
ancient grudges on our side of the border, and the loose talk of
annexation or absorption on yours, are now happily things of the
past. While we have an area greater than yours, and vast wealth in
natural resources, the fact that our population is only one twelfth of
yours means that you will for years to come exercise a strong
influence upon Canada.
“When you consider that the two countries have a joint border
more than three thousand miles long, on which there is no armed
force whatsoever; that they have created one joint commission that
settles all boundary disputes and another that disposes of questions
concerning waters common to both countries; that we are your
second best customer and that you are a large investor in our
enterprises; that many of our wage-workers have gone to you and
many of your farmers have come to us—taking all these things into
consideration, one may say that the two peoples have managed to
get along with one another in pretty good fashion.
“By closing your markets to us, through high tariffs, you
sometimes make things a bit difficult for some of our people. On the
other hand, we have erected some tariff barriers of our own. Our
fisheries, fruit industries, and manufactures now demand protection,
just as your farmers and others insist on having tariffs against some
Canadian products. Our people are divided by sectional interests,
just as yours are, and both governments have difficulty, at times, in
reconciling conflicting desires. But I think Washington and Ottawa
will always understand one another, and will work out successfully
their mutual problems of the future.”
Canada’s half million acres of timber contain fifty
per cent. of the forest resources of the entire British
Empire. The revenue from lumber and wood pulp
ranks next in value to that from agricultural products.
It takes a woodpile as big as a large apartment
house to carry one of Ottawa’s pulp mills through the
winter. These logs will make enough news print to
paper two roads reaching around the world.
With the United States as a “horrible example”,
Canada is trying to safeguard her forest from
destruction by fire or wasteful cutting. Airplanes are
frequently used by some of the provincial forest
patrols.
Few Americans realize how independent Canada is. She pays
not a dollar in taxes to the British, nor does she receive any funds
from the Imperial Treasury. The relations between the Dominion and
the Empire are not fixed by law, but, like the British constitution, are
unwritten and constantly changing. Canada maintains a High
Commissioner in London, concedes certain tariff preferences to
Great Britain and the other dominions, and her premier takes part in
the imperial conferences in London. In all other respects she goes
along in her own way and does exactly as she pleases. She played a
great part in the World War, and would undoubtedly fight again, but
only of her own free will. The people regard the Dominion as a
member of a “Commonwealth of Nations” united under the British
flag, and care little for talk of empire. They have even passed a law
putting an end to the system whereby the Crown conferred titles on
distinguished Canadians.
CHAPTER XII
THE LUMBER YARD OF AN EMPIRE