Re: attack by traffic analysis

On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Shahid Shoaib wrote:

> > with a global IP address. And suppose that John is acessing to the
> Internet
> > at a hot spot (e.g. a Starbucks cafe in Shinjuku). If a bad guy can
> > "traceroute" her/his session and knows the IP address of the cafe and its
> > location, the guy can know that John is now in the cafe in Shinjuku). I
> > think this problem is very general but becomes serious in mobile use.
>
> This is a very interesting problem which becomes more significant in the
> mobile enviroment. May be something can be done to shield the mobile users
> from such traceroutes.
>
> I do however, think that next generation mobile terminals will work through
> some sort of personal proxies and have dynamic instead of global IP
> addresses.
>

(just found the WG; not been reading all my list mail...)

I thought that with IPV6 we would get unique addresses for everything ?
Maybe not.

I can see that traceroute might reveal some location information, much as
my ip address reveals my city (at home) or employer (at work). The
accuracy is likely to be only a hundred feet or so for something like
802.11, or more for cellular, probably inadequate for identification.
However, it is clearly a privacy issue if you can tell even what city
someone is in. It may be possible to determine someone's mobile ip address
by mailing them an HTML mail with an image, or mail with return-receipt.

-- 
Andrew Daviel
Vancouver Webpages