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August 6, 2005
BOF review: alien
From: EKR Subject: BOF review: alien Date: 20050805 Summary: Not ready for prime time. The subject of this BOF was how to provide a measure of privacy for communications traffic. Most current traffic involves carrying around persistent identifiers (MAC address, IP address, TCP port pair, etc.) The idea here seems to be how to preserve a long-term association between two communicating parties without exposing that association to linkage by third-party eavesdroppers. This is a somewhat active research area and there were presentations about some of the work that has been going on. The work so far seems to mostly work in contexts where the parties have access to a large number of IP addresses because otherwise the IP can't really be hidden. This makes it somewhat impractical for most current deployments in the IPv4 environment. The general sense of the room seemed to be that this wasn't anywhere near ready for an IETF WG. There was some enthusiasm for an IRTF RG. The BOF chairs (Nikkander and Kempf) are going to work on a proposal for such an RG.
Posted by ekr at August 6, 2005 8:00 PM | Filed under: