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Context-Aware IPv6 Address Hopping

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Information and Communications Security (ICICS 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11999))

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Abstract

Different web browsers have developed approaches to better isolate the activities of users on different websites. However, those only work on the application-level and using the user’s IP address, all actions of the users can be linked. We present a context-aware IP address alteration scheme that utilizes the large IPv6 address space to protect against IP-address-based tracking.

We propose a scheme where a distinct outbound IPv6 address is used for each visited website and its dependencies. A prototype has been implemented and support for several web protocols and applications has been ensured. We evaluated the impact of the prototype on browsing performance. The results indicate that the impact is negligible. In combination with existing application-level measures, effective protection against tracking can be achieved.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The source code can be found at [39].

  2. 2.

    The browser profiles of the The Browser and our protoype had to be configured to allow accessing Firefox’s Performance API: privacy.resistFingerprinting =false.

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Acknowledgment

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. This work is supported in part by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under the reference number 16KIS0368 and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy under the reference number 03SIN432.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, University of Hamburg, Vogt-Kölln-Str. 30, 22527, Hamburg, Germany

    Matthias Marx, Monina Schwarz, Maximilian Blochberger, Frederik Wille & Hannes Federrath

Authors
  1. Matthias Marx
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  2. Monina Schwarz
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  3. Maximilian Blochberger
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  4. Frederik Wille
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  5. Hannes Federrath
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Matthias Marx .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore, Singapore

    Jianying Zhou

  2. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Xiapu Luo

  3. Peking University, Beijing, China

    Qingni Shen

  4. Institute of Information Engineering, Beijing, China

    Zhen Xu

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Marx, M., Schwarz, M., Blochberger, M., Wille, F., Federrath, H. (2020). Context-Aware IPv6 Address Hopping. In: Zhou, J., Luo, X., Shen, Q., Xu, Z. (eds) Information and Communications Security. ICICS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11999. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41579-2_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41579-2_31

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-41578-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-41579-2

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