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More Space, Less Privacy? Measuring the Effectiveness of IP-based Website Fingerprinting in IPv6#

PETS 2026 digest Program Adjacent pick 20–25 July 2026

Recording

Authors: Sumeer Ahmad (Stony Brook University), Michalis Polychronakis (Stony Brook University), Theophilus A. Benson (Carnegie Mellon University), Nguyen Phong Hoang (University of British Columbia)

Play the recording: More Space, Less Privacy? Measuring the Effectiveness of IP-based Website Fingerprinting in IPv6

  • Why: IPv6's address-space semantics — per-flow addresses, rotating /64s, SLAAC privacy extensions — are usually framed as a privacy win. This paper asks whether the expanded space (or its addressing habits) actually enables IP-based website linking/fingerprinting instead. That's a networking-semantics question with direct privacy consequences, from a strong measurement group (Polychronakis, Benson).
  • What: Apparently a measurement of how effectively websites or on-path observers can fingerprint/link clients by IP address in the IPv6 world — testing the assumption that IPv6 rotation defeats tracking (title/author line only — no abstract in program).
  • How: Not described in the program; expect large-scale measurement of IPv6 address stability, prefix behavior, and address-to-identity linkability across visits.
  • Where applicable: Web tracking, CDN/anti-abuse design, and any privacy engineering that relies on IPv6 address rotation; broadly applicable, not org-specific.