Mobile Inter-networking with IPv6 : Concepts, Principles and Practices

23

Location Privacy and IP Mobility

Why do my callers hear a different ringtone when I am out of the country? My SMS still has my home timezone!    –pondering over privacy quirks

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23.1 INTRODUCTION

Location privacy in IP networks is an emerging concept. It is also a very broad topic, with different opinions and requirements. It is inherently difficult to capture the essence of an emerging topic with little common agreement on the problem itself, leaving solutions aside for now. So, we confine ourselves to privacy concerns in using IP addresses themselves and the role of mobility (roaming) in privacy due to change of IP addresses.

Very generally, the IP location privacy problem can be stated as follows: Given an IP address and a database that maps IP prefixes to their geographical sites, how can the current physical location of a host be made harder to determine? The very fact that a database exists that maps IP prefixes to geographical location provides a reference against which the possible solutions for this problem are compared. So, the key considerations here are the granularity with which a physical location can be determined and what mechanisms could be devised to hide the fact that a user has roamed to a new network.

The databases which exist on the Internet map the IP prefixes to the names of organizations under which the prefixes are registered. A typical query of an ...