Privacy management for secure mobility

Abstract

Anonymous Internet access has been researched extensively and many proposals exist for enhancing the privacy of users. However, there are vast amounts of legacy authentication systems that do not take the privacy of the users into consideration. Many networks use, for example, MAC address or IP address based authentication, despite of their limited security properties. These authentication systems hinder the possibility to use e.g. pseurandom MAC addresses for privacy protection. In this paper, we propose a privacy management system for layers below the transport layer in the IP stack. Our implementation allows the users to decide their privacy parameters depending on their current situation. The implementation uses the Host Identity Protocol to provide authenticated and secure seamless handovers for mobile nodes. The approach is also applicable to an IP stack without the Host Identity Protocol.