Enlisting ISPs to Improve Online Privacy: IP Address Mixing by Default

Today’s Internet architecture makes no deliberate attempt to provide identity privacy—IP addresses are, for example, often static and the consistent use of a single IP address can leak private information to a remote party. Existing approaches for rectifying this situation and improving identity privacy fall into one of two broad classes: (1) building a privacy-enhancing overlay layer (like Tor) that can run on top of the existing Internet or (2) research into principled but often fundamentally different new architectures. We suggest a middle-ground: enlisting ISPs to assist in improving the identity privacy of users in a manner compatible with the existing Internet architecture, ISP best practices, and potential legal requirements1 .

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: PET
• Authors: Barath Raghavan, Tadayoshi Kohno, Alex C. Snoeren, David Wetherall
• Keywords: Identity Privacy, Identity Privacy Fall, Internet Architecture, PET 2009, Security Privacy