Privacy enhanced interface identifiers in IPv6

The Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPV6) proposed to replace IPV4 to solve scalability challenges and improve quality of service and security. Current implementation of IPv6 uses static value that is determined from the Media Access Control (MAC) address as the Interface Identifier (IID). This results in a deterministic IID for each user that is the same regardless of any network changes. This provides an eavesdropper with the ability to easily track the physical location of the communicating nodes using simple tools, such as ping and traceroute. Moreover, this address generation method provides a means to correlate network traffic with a specific user which can be achieved by filtering the IID and traffic analysis. These serious privacy breaches need to be addressed before widespread deployment of IPv6. In this paper we propose a privacy-enhanced method for generating IID which combines different network parameters. The proposed method generates non-deterministic IIDs that is resistance against correlation attack. We validate our approach using Wireshark, ping and traceroute tools and show that our proposed approach achieves better privacy compared to the existing IID generation methods