Transient and Drifting: packet-level identity privacy and location privacy using IPv6 addressing

Improving communication privacy for the Internet is increasingly important for users. Although there are various forms of protection for communication privacy at various communication layers, Internet communication requires packets to traverse the network. Packet addressing information needs to remain visible for correct forwarding of packets, and so address bits could be used for tracking individual users in terms of network usage and location, as well as building a picture of service usage through flow correlation. This talk describes an approach to packet-level addressing that provides enhanced protection against such privacy attacks. The approach only requires updates to the end-systems, works over existing networks and for existing applications, and can be deployed incrementally.