Re: [alto] Potential privacy issue in draft-deng-alto-p2p-ext-01?

From: alto [mailto:alto-bounces@ietf.org] On Behalf Of Y. Richard Yang
Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2014 8:09 PM
To: Sebastian Kiesel
Cc: IETF ALTO
Subject: Re: [alto] Potential privacy issue in draft-deng-alto-p2p-ext-01?

On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 10:35 AM, Sebastian Kiesel <ietf-alto@skiesel.de> wrote:

On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 12:16:16PM -0500, Vijay K. Gurbani wrote:
> On 06/26/2014 04:58 AM, Scharf, Michael (Michael) wrote:
> >Haibin asked me to send the following comment from a private
> >discussion also to the list:
> >
> >Section 3.3 of draft-deng-alto-p2p-ext-01 suggest a new Endpoint
> >Property Type "network_access" for P2P peer selection. As far as I
> >recall, this type of ALTO guidance was discussed in the past quite a
> >bit, and there may have been privacy concerns. For instance,
> >draft-ietf-alto-deployments-09 Section 3.2.4. includes the following
> >statement:
> >
> >o  Performance metrics that raise privacy concerns.  For instance,
> >it has been questioned whether an ALTO service could publicly expose
> >the provisioned access bandwidth, e.g. of cable / DSL customers,
> >because this could enables identification of "premium" customers.
> >
> >That text was already in draft-ietf-alto-deployments before I started
> >to edit this document.
> >
> >For P2P use cases, I wonder whether that concern might (still) apply
> >to endpoint properties such as DSL vs. FTTH as currently suggested
> >draft-deng-alto-p2p-ext-01.
>
> [As individual, of course.]
>
> I suspect the type of network access (DSL, cable, FTTH, satellite) is
> probably okay.  Commercial companies often publicly tout the deployment
> of certain access technologies in neighbourhoods.

I know some neighborhoods where FTTH is available, but at very high
prices.  Consequently, many people there prefer to keep their existing
xDSL or cable based Internet service.  If we used ALTO to announce who
decided to pay the high price for FTTH, I would consider this as a
potential privacy concern, because this would be some kind of list of
households with better-than-average income and/or computer professionals
or enthusiasts living there.

This is an interesting example, and provides a case where access control may be used. I always expect that there should be an access control mechanism, in given settings, to limit the information exposure of ALTO info. I can imagine that this can be endhost opt-in, or provider control (e.g., only certain trusted entities can access the URL).

[邓灵莉/Lingli Deng] Good idea. Greater flexibility can be delivered by access control at the discretion of both the network operator and the individual subscriber. 

Richard

Sebastian

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