Re: 6man w.g. last call for <draft-ietf-6man-default-iids-11.txt>

[Lorenzo Colitti <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, May 14, 2016 at 12:00 PM, Brian E Carpenter <
[e-mail]> wrote:

> Because if someone is trying to correlate different types of my traffic,
> let's say something sent over IPX and something sent over IPv6, the task
> will be made easier if the lower 48 bits are the same in both types of
> traffic. (Obviously, someone on-link can use ND to correlate MAC address
> and IP address, so we're talking about someone observing off-link packets.)
>

That seems extremely unlikely to happen in practice, given that the vast
majority of hosts either don't have an IPX stack at all or have it disabled
by default, and embedding a MAC address in a protocol payload is not very
useful so people tend not to do it.

By contrast, here is one weakness that is pretty much mandated by this
draft as written: because addresses have to be stable, any remote attacker
anywhere on the Internet that ever exchanges a packet with that host can
track it every time the host visits the same network, *forever*, with no
recourse. Section 3 point 1.

Either we fix that or we stop asserting that this draft is motivated by
privacy considerations.