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bfleschtoday at 11:13 AM7 repliesview on HN

Thanks for sharing. I want to ask you something: I understand that with IPv6 the idea is that every household receives several of IPv6 addresses so that every single IoT device has their unique IPv6 address and there is no NAT needed.

Would it be possible to use a dozen of IPv6 addresses at the same time? Like send one UDP packet over certain IPv6 interface, next packet over another IPv6 interface, and so on. If both sending and receiving end have access to multiple IPv6 addresses I can see how this significantly increases complexity for tracking.

Could you split up the traffic across dozens or hundreds of IPv6 source addresses?


Replies

krabtoday at 11:24 AM

> Could you split up the traffic across dozens or hundreds of IPv6 source addresses?

Yes

> I can see how this significantly increases complexity for tracking

Not really. You just track at some prefix level. In general, the ISP will hand out a /64 per consumer so that's what you can track. From there, you can build more complex and more precise grouping rules for tracking.

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neilalexandertoday at 11:17 AM

If you assign a subnet to a host, or allow the host to claim multiple addresses via ND from the link subnet, then you can use as many addresses as you want. You could give every process on your machine its own IPv6 address for example.

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jeroenhdtoday at 12:06 PM

The biggest tracking hurdle is to figure out if the ISP that handed out the block of addresses is handing out /64s, /56s, or /48s. The network provided to you is functionally the same as the IP address assigned to you with IPv4.

In theory I could rent an IPv4 /29 (of which 6 addresses are usable) for like 20 euros a month from my home ISP to cause the same confusion but I doubt it'd confuse trackers to use those.

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darkrtoday at 12:15 PM

yes - this is also part of the privacy extensions spec: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4941

jasonjayrtoday at 11:24 AM

IIRC you could still track because all those mutiple IPv6 addresses will have the same prefix.

immibistoday at 12:37 PM

Yes, but realistically the guy who is tracking you tracks the first 64 bits of the address, which identify the network.

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pastagetoday at 11:20 AM

It is quite easy todo 100 lines of Python, you can even send ip packets with faked source adress.

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