Re: Consensus call on adopting: <draft-gont-6man-stable-privacy-addresses-01>

[Fernando Gont <[e-mail]>]

Hi, Eliot,

On 04/18/2012 06:37 AM, Eliot Lear wrote:
>> On 04/13/2012 10:09 AM, Eliot Lear wrote:
>>> At one point you write that the intent is to replace EUI-64-based
>>> addresses (Section 5).  
>> Exactly.

[Correcting myself]

The intent is to have draft-gont-6man-stable-privacy-addresses used
instead of the IIDs that embed IEEE identifiers.



> Yes, I'm looking at the quoted paragraphs (I'm not quite sure from where
> you're quoting):
>>      As noted in [RFC4941], "anytime a fixed identifier is used in
>>       multiple contexts, it becomes possible to correlate seemingly
>>       unrelated activity using this identifier".  Therefore, since
>>       "privacy addresses" [RFC4941] do not eliminate the use of fixed
>>       identifiers for server-like functions, they only *partially*
>>       mitigate the correlation of host activities (see Section 7 for
>>       some example attacks that are still possible with privacy
>>       addresses).  Therefore, it is vital that the privacy
> 
> And so on.  In essence you set up an argument against 4941 but that
> isn't really your argument for the draft and so I don't really know what
> it's doing there.  

It's not an argument against RFc4941, but rather an argument that even
with RFC4941, you still need to do something about the IEEE-based IIDs.
At the Paris IETF, some folks argued that if you have RFC 4941 in place,
you don't need draft-gont-6man-stable-privacy-addresses. Section 7 of
draft-gont-6man-stable-privacy-addresses (which should be an Appendix,
rather than a section in the main body of the document) illustrates that
that's not the case: even if you're employing RFC4941, you're still
subject to host-scanning attacks and host tracking.

It is *not* an argument *against* RFC 4941, since it *is* valuable to
have addresses that change over time for outging communications.



>But perhaps that's not as important as this:
> 
>>> I am concerned that adopting this
>>> mechanism will make matters worse if this mechanism is being used as an
>>> alternative to CGAs, as opposed to EUI-64s..
>> I don't follow. Could you clarify your concern?
> 
> You argue that this is an alternative to EUI-64s.  

Let me correct myself: this is an alternative to IIDs that embed IEEE
identifiers: The modified EUI-64 format is a general format, and it does
not need to embed IEEE identifiers (for instance, RFC4941 produce
Mod-EUI-64 format identifiers, bu clearly do not embed IEEE identifiers).


> But in practice I am
> concerned that people will not use this as an alternative to EUI-64s,
> but instead as an alternative to CGAs, 

Why?

I don't really follow the relationship of
draft-gont-6man-stable-privacy-addresses with CGAs. CGAs are used for
SEND, and are not even mentioned in this I-D.

How do you arrive to the conclusion that people might want to use this
instead of CGAs??

As noted in the I-D tihs mechanism is meant to be a replacement for IIDs
based on IEEE identifiers. This is orthogonal to RFC4941 and orthogonal
to CGAs.

Thanks,
-- 
Fernando Gont
SI6 Networks
e-mail: [e-mail]
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