User untraceability in the next-generation Internet: a proposal

Internet is changing. The adoption of IPv6 is only one change. The number of mobile hosts connected to the network is increasing also due to the wide application of the wireless technology. In this scenario there are also new threats to user privacy. This paper analyzes how to protect the user privacy in a global view from the data link level up to the applications. In fact, several information about user habits in terms of identity, physical location and movements as well as corresponding hosts and visited sites can be inferred by eavesdropping the data exchanged on local networks at the data link layer. We describe a method to compute dynamically changing unique hardware addresses of network interfaces for the anonymization of data-link traffic and how to integrate this protection with those available at the upper layers. . Dept. of Engineering, University of Ferrara, Italy. [email protected] . Dept. of Computer Science, University of Bologna. Italy. [email protected]