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FBI: New Internet addresses could hinder police investigations | 300 comments | Create New Account

Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.

FBI: New Internet addresses could hinder police investigations

Authored by: JamesK on Tuesday, June 05 2012 @ 05:03 PM EDT

No, they're not an artifact of Windows. Linux does it too. As I mentioned, the reason for those random addresses is privacy concerns. I found it curious that Android devices don't use random addresses.

Here's some info from Cisco on this:

Random Identifiers
The EUI-48-to-EUI-64 transform process is attractive because it is simple to implement. However, it generates a privacy problem. Global unicast as well as link-local addresses may be built with an identifier derived from the MAC address. A Website tracking where a node frequently attaches can collect private information such as the time spent by employees in the enterprise or at home.

Because a MAC address follows the interface it is attached to, the identifier of an IPv6 address does not change with the physical location of the Internet connection. Hence it is possible to trace the movements of a portable laptop or Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or other mobile IPv6 device.

RFC 3041 [5] allows the generation of a random identifier with a limited lifetime. Because IPv6 architecture permits multiple suffixes per interface, a single network interface is assigned two global addresses, one derived from the MAC address and one from a random identifier. A typical policy for use of these two addresses would be to keep the MAC-derived global address for inbound connections and the random address for outbound connections. A reason for not using it for inbound connections is the need to update the DNS just as frequently as it is changes.

Such a system, with two different global addresses—one of which changes regularly—becomes very difficult to trace.

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