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).

Richard

>
> Sebastian
>
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