Privacy enhanced interface identifiers in IPv6

Odero, SO; Dargahi, T; Takruri-Rizk, H

Abstract

The Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPV6) proposed to
replace IPV4 to solve scalability challenges and improve
quality of service and security. Current implementation of IPv6
uses static value that is determined from the Media Access
Control (MAC) address as the Interface Identifier (IID). This
results in a deterministic IID for each user that is the same
regardless of any network changes. This provides an
eavesdropper with the ability to easily track the physical
location of the communicating nodes using simple tools, such
as ping and traceroute. Moreover, this address generation
method provides a means to correlate network traffic with a
specific user which can be achieved by filtering the IID and
traffic analysis. These serious privacy breaches need to be
addressed before widespread deployment of IPv6. In this paper
we propose a privacy-enhanced method for generating IID
which combines different network parameters. The proposed
method generates non-deterministic IIDs that is resistance
against correlation attack. We validate our approach using
Wireshark, ping and traceroute tools and show that our
proposed approach achieves better privacy compared to the
existing IID generation methods.

Citation

Odero, S., Dargahi, T., & Takruri-Rizk, H. Privacy enhanced interface identifiers in IPv6. Presented at CSNDSP 2020 - 12th IEEE/IET International Symposium on Communication Systems, Networks and Digital Signal Processing, Online

• Presentation Conference Type: Other
• Conference Name: CSNDSP 2020 - 12th IEEE/IET International Symposium on Communication Systems, Networks and Digital Signal Processing
• Conference Location: Online
• End Date: Jul 22, 2020
• Acceptance Date: May 1, 2020
• Publication Date: Jul 22, 2020
• Deposit Date: Jun 5, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 5, 2020
• Related Public URLs: https://csndsp2020.av.it.pt/
• Additional Information: Event Type : Conference