Subject: privacy in ipv6 ?

From: Gigablast <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2016 16:44:25 -0600

hi,

would it be possible to insert some kind of 'privacy' flag into each
data packet in IPv6
so that the originating IP address would be scrambled at each router hop?
(kinda like how NAT works, but on internet backbone routers)

websites and other services that would be afraid of 'attacks' could opt out
and just drop such packets.

just wondering if something like this is already in production or if it
would be something interesting, because a lot of people are more and more
concerned with privacy and do not want to be traced by their
IP address. furthermore, this might help bolster net neutrality.

i run a small search engine and can't compete with google/bing because
a small handfull of providers (cloudflare, etc.) are blocking my legitimate crawler from
millions of the top websites.

matt

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From: joel jaeggli <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2016 08:59:22 -0700

The source address is a locator used to address the ip packets the
server returns to the initiator. Short of encapsulation such that you
have an unmolested inner ip header the recipient is in need of the
source address. the same applies to ipv4 of course so there's nothing
special about that. reading between the lines I think you're assuming
some kind of reversable path transformation but forward and reverse
paths cannot in general be assumed to be symmetric especially if you
change it mid-flight.

You might explore onion routing, as employed by tor or as a more general
topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing as that methodology
specifies the path to be taken to exit as well as an encapsulating
layers to be stripped off at each hop.

joel