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and

They handle the link-local addresses in a reasonable way: uses MAC address when there's a random MAC address, otherwise a stable privacy address. They were previously screwing up MAC address randomization by always using stable link-local privacy addresses on newer Linux kernels.

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We were disabling that feature downstream but now we no longer need to disable it since they fixed it to be conditional. There are still other issues though. The Linux kernel happily reuses the global privacy address across networks. State isn't always properly flushed for it.

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It's worse to have privacy addresses enabled right now if you're using MAC randomization than not having them enabled. In theory, they help due to rotation but in practice there are serious issues with them. Some network management tools reset more state and handle it better.

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There are other issues aside from the addresses. It's frustrating digging deeper into it and realizing how screwed up this stuff is in the Linux kernel. Shouldn't need to reboot between connecting to each network to avoid reusing identifiers, 'keys', counters, etc. for things.

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and

Agree, and we don't intend to disable privacy addresses, but it's frustrating that a privacy feature is making things worse than not using the feature. Not much point using privacy addresses for link-local addresses though, so the new status quo for that upstream is good.

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If you want to avoid correlation, why do you use stable addresses in the first place? Why not RFC8981 addressess only?

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FWIW, we explicitly removed the requirement to configure stable addresses with that in mind ;-)

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Associated MAC randomization is enabled by default in Android. It uses a persistent per-network random MAC address. When MAC randomization is enabled, they use a link-local IP address based on the MAC address. They only use the stable privacy address feature when MAC rand is off.

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GrapheneOS adds an ephemeral MAC randomization option and that's the default for us. It can be changed to per-network MAC randomization or disabling MAC randomization, which are the 2 options in AOSP and the stock OS on Pixels without modifications to them.

9:14 AM · May 23, 2021Twitter Web App

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The broken part is the public privacy address feature in the Linux kernel. We should have a fix for our next release though. Have known about it for quite some time but we needed to figure out the best way of working around it. There are other non-address-related issues too.

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My take is that if you randomize the MAC addresses (*not* on a per-network basis), you probably have no reason for configuring a stable address. -- so you should doing RFC8981-only.

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Stable privacy addresses are only used by Android when MAC randomization is disabled. The stable privacy address feature otherwise isn't used. The issue with public IPv6 addresses isn't an intentional design choice by Android but rather a Linux kernel design issue.

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