[Ndn-interest] NDN protocol principles: no privacy?

[Mark Stapp]

interesting -

On 3/14/16 11:27 AM, Burke, Jeff wrote:
>
[...]
RFC 6973 takes a nice approach, for example, by offering
>> definitions of some technical properties and mechanisms, but not trying
>> to formulate an overall definition of "privacy".
>
> So I can try to understand your point here - do you agree with the
authors that the primary privacy concerns are those of individuals? (Or,
more generally, are corporations people here for this discussion - a
more generic "data owner"?)
>

hmm - well, I don't think corporations are people, in the citizens 
united sense, but I think there's lots of commercial communication that 
needs to have the best possible protection, whether it's B2C or B2B?

>> The editors there say
>> that the body of the document, the discussion of the tradeoffs and
>> alternatives, is the best way they could come up with to approach that
>> abstraction. in practical terms, as you know well I think there's been
>> an over-reliance on opportunistic caching in ICN generally, and as a
>> result observability and correlation are defined to be positive
>> properties of ICN communication rather than harmful ones.
>
>
> Would I be correct to parse your concerns into two pieces that may
have different implications:
>
> - Confidentiality of request (e.g., the consumer side)
> - Confidentiality of publication (e.g., the publisher side)
>

I think I have a mental image of "confidential request" - where an 
observer cannot see much beyond the routeable prefix needed to reach an 
instance of the service I want to communicate with. I'm not sure what 
"confidential publication" means, though? I think I want the replies to 
my requests to be encrypted with ephemeral, forward-secure key material, 
I don't want the names in the replies to expose any more than the names 
in the requests, and I want to be able to authenticate the service 
before I expose anything about my own identity or intentions. is that 
what you meant by "the publisher side"?

[...]

>>
>> most of these six "principles" sounded like "mechanisms" to me - the
>> list felt like the end of a discussion about alternatives and the best
>> ways to implement an architecture, rather than the start of one. it
>> sounded like "we're tired of questions about LPM in the PIT, so we're
>> going to stop calling that a possible mechanism and start calling it an
>> inevitable, immutable, unquestionable 'principle'".
>
> Well, to take LPM for an example - it's actually not mentioned in
> the
principle doc that Alex sent. The principle I suspect that you are
referring to is:
>
> [5] In-Network Name Discovery: Interests should be able use
> incomplete
names to retrieve data packets.
> A consumer may not know the complete network-level name for data, as
some parts of the name cannot be guessed, computed, or inferred
beforehand. Once initial data is received, naming conventions can help
determine complete names of other related data:
>
>
> * majority of interests will carry complete names
>
> * in-network name discovery expected to be used to bootstrap
communication)
>
>
>
> Can you explain your objection in these terms?
>

sure - I don't want to expose names that identify me, or expose my 
communication activities. given that, the "network" doesn't have the job 
of finding things for me by partial names - I only want to expose the 
details of my communication to a service that I have authenticated, and 
only when those details are encrypted. the "names" visible to the 
network in that sort of world just get the packets moving - and the only 
LPM needed is LPM in the FIB to get me to one or more instances of a 
service.

Thanks,
Mark