Secured anonymous ID assignment support for LIN6

Abstract

Although mobility support protocols such as Mobile IPv6 and LIN6 are essential for a real mobile computing environment, there is an privacy issue: these protocols have to disclose an identity of the node to receive the benefit of mobility support. In this paper, we attempt to address this issue by assigning an identity to a mobile node dynamically and securely without disclosing the statically-assigned ID of the node in the LIN6 protocol. In our method, a mobile node generates an ephemeral public/private key pair and decides a LIN6 ID that is given by a hash of the public key. This LIN6 ID is called "anonymized LIN6 ID". Then the mobile node requests to assign this ID dynamically to the Mapping Agent that maintains location information of the ID. The Mapping Agent issues a shared secret for updating the location information to the mobile node by using the public key. A mobile node can discard the ID or request a new ID whenever the node wants, thus it is hard to track the mobile node with the anonymized LIN6 ID. We also discuss the characteristics of anonymity and the potential of DoS attack in our proposed method. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.