Bootstrapping Accountability and Privacy to IPv6 Internet without Starting from Scratch

Accountability and privacy are considered valuable but conflicting properties in the Internet, which at present does not provide native support for either. Past efforts to balance accountability and privacy in the Internet have unsatisfactory deployability due to the introduction of new communication identifiers, and because of large-scale modifications to fully deployed infrastructures and protocols. The IPv6 is being deployed around the world and this trend will accelerate. In this paper, we propose a private and accountable proposal based on IPv6 called PAVI that seeks to bootstrap accountability and privacy to the IPv6 Internet without introducing new communication identifiers and large-scale modifications to the deployed base. A dedicated quantitative analysis shows that the proposed PAVI achieves satisfactory levels of accountability and privacy. The results of evaluation of a PAVI prototype show that it incurs little performance overhead, and is widely deployable.