On 10/05/2016 08:54 PM, Peter Saint-Andre - Filament wrote: > Over on the CORE WG list, we've had a little discussion about the > desirability (or not) of unique identifiers for devices in the Internet > of Things. The message below provides some context. > > I'd be curious to learn more about the attack surface lurking behind > Stephen Farrell's comment that having long-term stable identifiers for > IoT devices is a privacy-unfriendly practice because people will abuse > such identifiers. > > To be clear, the scenarios I have in mind are not specific to CoAP and > don't always involve IP-based networking (the technology I'm working on > these days enables mesh networking over long-range radio), but they do > involve discovery and eventual communication that is both end-to-end > encrypted and as close to metadata-hiding as possible. > > Thanks! > > Peter > > -------- Forwarded Message -------- > Subject: Re: [core] Implications of IP address / port changes for CoAP & Co > Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2016 00:11:26 +0100 > From: Stephen Farrell > To: [email protected] <[email protected]> > > > Hi Peter, > > On 06/10/16 00:03, Peter Saint-Andre - Filament wrote: >> On 10/5/16 4:28 PM, Stephen Farrell wrote: >> >>> On 05/10/16 23:22, Dave Thaler wrote: >>>> It is important that every device have a unique UUID that is >>>> endpoint-address-agnostic and protocol-agnostic. >>> >>> Considering the privacy implications I'm not at all sure I'd >>> accept that argument. In fact I'd argue we ought encourage >>> that devices not have globally unique long-term identifiers at >>> all unless there is a real need for those, and unless we >>> understand how to control their (ab)use. >> >> By "identifier" do we necessarily mean "network identifier"? It seems to >> me that it is useful to have a unique long-term identifier for every >> device, based on its public key. Whether you can obtain a network >> connection to that device based on such information is another story. > > It is undoubtedly useful to have long term stable identifiers of > various kinds. I'd include key IDs and public keys as such. > > Turns out that it's also fairly universally privacy unfriendly > as people will abuse such identifiers for good and bad reasons. > > So I think we need to get much better at analysing when such > things are really needed and in what scope. My bet is that a lot > of the time a locally or probabilistically unique more transient > identifier would be just fine. > > But yeah, I can't prove that. OTOH there is a hint in the term > "IMSI catcher" isn't there?
At the risk of sounding our own horn, draft-gont-numeric-ids-generation might be useful for guidance. For instance, our I-D essentially argues that you should be asking yourself the question: "what are the interoperability properties you need for such IDs?". Thanks! Best regards, -- Fernando Gont SI6 Networks e-mail: [email protected] PGP Fingerprint: 6666 31C6 D484 63B2 8FB1 E3C4 AE25 0D55 1D4E 7492 _______________________________________________ perpass mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/perpass
