Rintel: NetworkManager and privacy in the IPv6 internet

On his blog, Lubomir Rintel discusses IPv6 privacy issues and how they are being handled by NetworkManager. "Creation of a privacy stable address relies on a pseudo-random key that's only known the the host itself and never revealed to other hosts in the network. This key is then hashed using a cryptographically secure algorithm along with values specific for a particular network connection. It includes an identifier of the network interface, the network prefix and possibly other values specific to the network such as the wireless SSID. The use of the secret key makes it impossible to predict the resulting address for the other hosts while the network-specific data causes it to be different when entering a different network.This also solves the duplicate address problem nicely. The random key makes collisions unlikely. If, in spite of this, a collision occurs then the hash can be salted with a DAD failure counter and a different address can be generated instead of failing the network connectivity. Now that's clever."