RE: Unique identifiers and privacy

Hi,

The paper was an answer to part of your worries about the identifier
privacy problems. I'll continue the discussion off-list, because the
paper is a bit out of Multi6 scope, and most people haven't read it.

Thanks, Jukka

> Well, the paper explains that it would be inconvenient for M to refer to
> James Bond by location, e.g. "10 Market Street" and later "101 Main
> Street". You use that to make the classic case for location independent
> identifiers, but this case disregard the fact that while James Bond may
> want to be known to M, he probably does not want to be immediately
> recognized as James Bond by Goldfinger and Dr. No. In fact, when dealing
> with these characters, being known by the current location may be vastly
> preferable.
>
> You do obtain some privacy by conducting a Diffie-Hellman exchange
> before actually exchanging the identity. This will meet one of the
> privacy requirements, by making the identity opaque to the third parties
> in the path. However, you do not solve all the issues related to
> permanent identities, i.e. that Mr. Bond wants to present uncorrelated
> identities to M and to Goldfinger. In the latter case, we probably want
> something much more light weight than a full cryptographic exchange --
> some random number would be fine, along the lines of the COT/COTI
> exchange in MIP6.
>
> By the way, I did not actually analyze the way you suggest to use
> Diffie-Hellman and public keys, but I have the impression that your
> mechanism is very similar to IKE. This begs an obvious question.
> Cryptographic protocols are notoriously hard to get right. Instead of
> inventing a new one, we should probably work with the IPSEC working
> group and either adapt IKE or make sure that the planned revision of IKE
> also meets the needs of Multi6.
>
> -- Christian Huitema
>
>