Comment Re:Not a worry for me (Score 1) 259
The MAC address section of IPv6 is used mostly for locally addressable destinations. It makes an easier job for routers to figure out whether to route the packet.
It is stripped off (or obfuscated) by a router when sending packets out into the big bad internet.
What makes you think that? "Seperating Identifiers and Locators in Addresses: an Analysis of the GSE Proposal for IPv6" (draft-ietf-ipngwg-esd-analysis-04.txt) says:
"In contrast, connections in GSE are identified by the ESDs rather than full IPv6 addresses. That is, connections are identified uniquely by the tuple: (srcESD, dstESD, srcport, dstport). Consequently, when demultiplexing incoming packets to their proper end point, TCP would ignore the Routing Stuff portions of addresses."
etc. Basically, the RG portion of the IPv6 address can be stripped, but the ESD (which contains the MAC address) can't.
I'm not convinced it's a privacy concern -- witness the "Privacy Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in IPv6" draft -- but it sure doesn't seem that the ESD can be stripped.
Sumner
It is stripped off (or obfuscated) by a router when sending packets out into the big bad internet.
What makes you think that? "Seperating Identifiers and Locators in Addresses: an Analysis of the GSE Proposal for IPv6" (draft-ietf-ipngwg-esd-analysis-04.txt) says:
"In contrast, connections in GSE are identified by the ESDs rather than full IPv6 addresses. That is, connections are identified uniquely by the tuple: (srcESD, dstESD, srcport, dstport). Consequently, when demultiplexing incoming packets to their proper end point, TCP would ignore the Routing Stuff portions of addresses."
etc. Basically, the RG portion of the IPv6 address can be stripped, but the ESD (which contains the MAC address) can't.
I'm not convinced it's a privacy concern -- witness the "Privacy Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in IPv6" draft -- but it sure doesn't seem that the ESD can be stripped.
Sumner
