IPv6 Interview Questions and critic

Tue Aug 27 14:49:06 UTC 2002

ooh how exciting, you can tell who uses 3Com network cards :)

Most networks eg P2P will use /127 and not use MAC anyway so I cant see this
being a privacy on issue on anything but end devices and you can override if yuo
feel the need...

On end devices by default yes it uses mac, I cant see why this would be a real
security hole.. vulnerabilities exist in the OS/Apps not the hardware. For the
paranoid theres no reason why yuo cant manually assign the full IPv6 address
anyhow, the use of MACs is only there to provide convenience so users dont need
to configure their networks.

NMAP fingerprinting is of far more interest than what NIC vendor whitehouse.gov
uses (unless your doing market research on NIC cards I guess ;)

Steve

On Tue, 27 Aug 2002, Joe Baptista wrote:

> 
> 
> Hi:
> 
> I'm doing an article on IPv6 and am looking for comments - here is a
> portion on IPv6 which relates to the privacy issue ... any comments,
> crtics or interviews welcomed.
> 
> -- snip
> As you know IPv6 is a suite of protocols for the network layer of the
> Internet which uses IPv4 gateways.  It's purpose is to expand address
> space.  At this time IPv6 comes prepackaged with all popular operating
> systems. This includes all flavours of unix , windows and Mac OS.
> 
> IPv6 is designed to solve many of the problems of the current version of
> IPv4 with regard to address depletion. The goal is to use IPv6 to expand
> the capabilities of the Internet to enable a variety of valuable
> peer-to-peer and mobile applications.  According to many industry pundits
> it is the future of networking.
> 
> However IPv6 has many privacy issues. IPv6 address space uses an ID
> (indentifier) derived from your hardware or phone.  "That allows your
> packets to be traced back to your PC or cell-phone" said <censored>.
> <censored> fears abuse as a hardware ID wired into the ipv6 protocol can
> be used to determine the manufacturer, make and model number, and value
> of the hardware equipment being used by the end user.
> 
> Ipv6 empowers the business community by providing a means of identifying
> and tracking users.  Under Ipv6 users can be tracked and income
> demographics determined through hardware identification.
> 
> Many members of the networking community have addressed concerns that the
> technology could result in potential abuse and <censored> warns users to
> think twice before they buy themselves a used Lap-Top computer and inherit
> all the prior surfing history of the previous user?
> 
> Ipv6 uses 128 bits to provide addressing, routing and identification
> information on a computer. The 128-bits are divided into the left-64 and
> the right-64.  Ipv6 uses the right 64 bits to store an IEEE defined global
> identifier (EUI64). This identifier is composed of company id value
> assigned to a manufacturer by the IEEE Registration Authority. The 64-bit
> identifier is a concatenation of the 24-bit company_id value and a 40-bit
> extension identifier assigned by the organization with that company_id
> assignment. The 48-bit MAC address of your network interface card is also
> used to make up the EUI64.
> -- snip
> 
> Cheers Joe Baptista
> 
> --
> Planet Communications & Computing Facility
> a division of The dot.GOD Registry, Limited
> 
> 