3 ms·

NAT only anonymizes folks behind that one router, and in a typical household that's down to just a couple of individuals. Combined with other hints (including

NAT only anonymizes folks behind that one router, and in a typical household that's down to just a couple of individuals. Combined with other hints (including browser fingerprinting), NAT provides very little privacy protection, especially given how long-lived the average IPv4 DHCP lease lasts. > I think the solution for this is for operating systems to allow applications to request a fresh IP address, or something like that. Obviously that would be a highly difficult and disruptive change at multiple levels... IPv6 already has this capability: https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2014/12/ipv6-privacy-addresses-provide-protection-against-surveillance-and-tracking/ https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2014/12/ipv6-privacy-ad... That randomization occurs on a higher frequency than a typical DHCP lease expiration. For a home that has a /48, this is no better or worse than NAT, since you can still only track devices to the home. If your individual devices have their own IPs within the ISP address space, then the best an outsider could do is track devices to a given ISP subnet. Of course, again, the real threat is browser fingerprinting and similar technologies, which are entirely independent of the underlying network.

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
No, I don’t think privacy addresses as currently implemented addresses the problem. All browsers on my machine still share the same ipv6, whereas I think they should get unique ipv6 addresses if they want them. Fingerprinting is more tractable to defeat by disabling all JS, for example. Also, you seem to be saying that because NAT doesn’t provide much privacy, we shouldn’t care if we get even less privacy. I disagree with that.
- CarelessExpert 6y ago
  > All browsers on my machine still share the same ipv6, whereas I think they should get unique ipv6 addresses if they want them. Yup, sorry, I overlooked that part of your comment. That said, I'm still not convinced it buys you much... maybe a bit of an improvement, but... > Fingerprinting is more tractable to defeat by disabling all JS, for example. Sorry, that's just completely unreasonable. JS is basically table stakes at this point for virtually any website to reasonably function. Worse, it feels like an arms race between browsers and the ad tech giants when it comes to try and defeat fingerprinting. Now, imagine you could break the 1:1 connection between browser engine and user. For example, imagine a bank of cloud hosted browser engines out in the cloud. You have a thin "client" that uses this headless cloud browser using a remote display technique of some kind (just batch up, serialize, transport, and render DOM updates, while passing back user interaction events?). Between sessions the state is wiped, and they're randomly shared among clients of the system... I'm sure there's a zillion legal and technical hurdles, but unless you break the 1:1 relationship between browser and user, fingerprinting feels inevitable. > Also, you seem to be saying that because NAT doesn’t provide much privacy No, I'm just saying IPv6 provides no less. And either way, while it's not nothing it ain't that much.

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago

No, I don’t think privacy addresses as currently implemented addresses the problem. All browsers on my machine still share the same ipv6, whereas I think they should get unique ipv6 addresses if they want them. Fingerprinting is more tractable to defeat by disabling all JS, for example. Also, you seem to be saying that because NAT doesn’t provide much privacy, we shouldn’t care if we get even less privacy. I disagree with that.

CarelessExpert 6y ago
> All browsers on my machine still share the same ipv6, whereas I think they should get unique ipv6 addresses if they want them. Yup, sorry, I overlooked that part of your comment. That said, I'm still not convinced it buys you much... maybe a bit of an improvement, but... > Fingerprinting is more tractable to defeat by disabling all JS, for example. Sorry, that's just completely unreasonable. JS is basically table stakes at this point for virtually any website to reasonably function. Worse, it feels like an arms race between browsers and the ad tech giants when it comes to try and defeat fingerprinting. Now, imagine you could break the 1:1 connection between browser engine and user. For example, imagine a bank of cloud hosted browser engines out in the cloud. You have a thin "client" that uses this headless cloud browser using a remote display technique of some kind (just batch up, serialize, transport, and render DOM updates, while passing back user interaction events?). Between sessions the state is wiped, and they're randomly shared among clients of the system... I'm sure there's a zillion legal and technical hurdles, but unless you break the 1:1 relationship between browser and user, fingerprinting feels inevitable. > Also, you seem to be saying that because NAT doesn’t provide much privacy No, I'm just saying IPv6 provides no less. And either way, while it's not nothing it ain't that much.