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Anonymous Identifiers
charter-ietf-alien-01

Document Charter Anonymous Identifiers WG (alien)
Title Anonymous Identifiers
Last updated 2006-01-26
State Approved
WG State Concluded
IESG Responsible AD (None)
Charter edit AD (None)
Send notices to (None)

charter-ietf-alien-01

Privacy is becoming a more pressing issue in the Internet
architecture. There are several reasons for this, including new or
proposed legistlation in various countries, the Internet becoming more
ubiquitous and mobile, and changes in people's expectations.
Furthermore, there are many different perspectives on network-related
privacy, and some of these are based on different expectations with
respect to privacy in different countries and cultures.

The BOF has three distinct goals:

  1. To initiate long-term architectural discussion on privacy within
    the community. One possible outcome of this would be chartering of a
    privacy research group at the IRTF. The goal of this work is to define
    exactly what network-related privacy means and to understand the
    breadth and depth of the problem.

  2. To initiate shorter-term work to define how to implement and use
    the existing protocols in such a way that the privacy-sensitive
    information, such as a user's more-permanent network-layer identity,
    is not unnecessarily revealed, thereby compromising their network
    privacy. It is envisioned that a new working group crossing the
    Security and Internet Areas might be a suitable forum for this work,
    and that if such a working group is formed, it could also act as a
    common discussion forum to help in co-ordinating protocol-specific
    work; see the next item.

  3. To briefly discuss some specific needs to modify existing
    protocols, such as Mobile IP, in order to improve their privacy
    properties. As a baseline, it is assumed that such work would probably
    be best conveyed in existing working or research groups, such as MIP4,
    MIP6 or MOBOPTS, whenever there is an active group for the protocol at
    hand.

The focus of the proposed work will be on protecting communicating
parties' privacy against eavesdroppers and other third parties.
Therefore, unlinkability of various identifiers used in protocols is
an important matter; see below. Focus will be on the internetworking
layer (IP protocols) and layers close to it, with less attention paid
to specific applications or physical layer issues. While it is
necessary to understand link layer issues, proposals to change
existing link layer protocols or to define new link layer protocols is
explicitly out of scope.

Location privacy in the sense of keeping location related information,
such as the IP address, of a mobile host private from its active peers
is explicitly out of scope. However, location privacy in the sense of
keeping a given mobile user's location-related information private
from third parties, i.e. hosts and nodes with which the node does not
have active communication with, falls within the proposed scope.