alt Hacker NewsYou can't correlate the number of addresses with the number of devices because IPv6 temporary addresses exist. If you enable temporary addresses, your computer will periodically randomly generate a new address and switch to it.
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jrm4 • yesterday at 4:59 PM
"If you enable" is doing ALL THE HEAVY LIFTING THERE.
Again, my point isn't about what is possible, but what is likely. -- which is MUCH MORE IMPORTANT for the real world.
If we'd started out in an IPv6 world, the defaults would have been "easy to discover unique addresses" and it's reasonable to think that would have made "pay per device" or other negatives that much easier.
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I feel like this is a silly narrowing of the problem for normal, retail users. My priority isn't masking "the number of addresses" or devices. My desire is to not have a persistent identifier to correlate all my traffic. The whole idea of temporary addresses fails at this because the network prefix becomes the correlation ID.
I'm not an IPv4 apologist though. Clearly the NAT/DHCP assignments from the ISP are essentially the same risk, with just one shallow layer of pseudo-obscurity. I'd rather have IPv6 and remind myself that my traffic is tagged with my customer ID, one way or another.
Unfortunately, I see no real hope that this will ever be mitigated. Incentives are not aligned for any ISP to actually help mask customer traffic. It seems that onion routing (i.e. Tor) is the best anyone has come up with, and I suspect that in today's world, this has become a net liability for a mundane, privacy-conscious user.