RE: [RRG] perceived privacy issue

["Tony Li" <tony.li@tony.li>]

|% That's been widely discussed during
|% the first iteration of GSE and pretty generally viewed
|% as a Bad Idea. At the very least, there needs to be a
|% mechanism to escape from the MAC address and jump
|% to a separately assigned space.
|
|This concern is misplaced, and there is nothing magic
|here about a MAC as the Identifier.  Any Identifier
|will have the same essential properties.


Any identifier space is necessarily going to confront the same issues, it's
true, and require some means of hosts being able to change identifiers at
some point in time.  Obviously, anything associated with the old identifier
is lost in a change, so there is a non-zero cost involved.


|Traffic analysis techniques have been employed commercially
|since at least the middle 1990s to track users -- even users
|that change IP addresses often.  I understand that such methods
|continue to be used (and continue to be effective) by a number
|of firms on the network.  Note that these methods can track
|"users", and are not limited to just tracking "nodes".
|
|While I don't have a URL to hand just this minute, I understand
|that recent work at U. Cambridge of late has put additional
|network traffic analysis methods into the published literature.
|
|I don't object per se to an "escape mechanism", but I do NOT
|believe that there is any real privacy benefit to such a mechanism.
|I feel similarly about the IPv6 Privacy Extensions (sic),
|which have similar levels of (in)effectiveness.


While I cannot disagree with you technically, it does seem to me that those
advocating privacy will definitely raise the issue and that any eventual
engineering solution will need to provide some mechanism for addressing
those concerns, misplaced or not.

Tony
 


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