Variable and scalable security: protection of location information in mobile IP

The amount of mobile and nomadic computing is expected to increase dramatically in the near future. Hand in hand with this ubiquitous mobile computing security and privacy problems show up, which have not been dealt with sufficiently up to now. The main problems are traffic analysis and the easy access to location information, for example in the popular Internet just by looking at the address headers of messages. The need for security and privacy supporting networks is discussed. We present the nondisclosure method (NDM) as a way to provide the user with variable and scalable security and privacy. We exemplarily demonstrate the applicability of NDM in an existing network by presenting an upward compatible protocol extension to the Internet protocol (IP), the secure IP in IP protocol. Its main design goal is the untraceability of network connections in mobile environments.