School of Computer Science
Updated 02 June 2026 by saleem. © 2006-2026, All Rights Reserved.
ILNP - News
IETF126/Vienna : ILNP experiments continue (2026-06-02)
Come and say, "Hello", to us at IETF126/Vienna! We will be at the Hackathon, and will have a demonstration set up throughout the week for ILNP.
I will be giving a talk on how ILNP improves packet level privacy at RIPE92 in Edinburgh, UK, 18-22 May 2026.
2026-06-02 update.
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RIPE92 programme page
Presentation: video (YouTube) | slides -
Videos from the talk:
- ephemeral NID (eNID) demo (no sound)
- multipath flow demo (no sound)
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Photos courtesy of RIPE NCC, photographs by Andrew Godfrey Photography
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 - Abstract:
Improving communication privacy for the Internet is increasingly important for users. Although there are various forms of protection for communication privacy at various communication layers, Internet communication requires packet addressing information to remain visible for correct forwarding of packets. So, address bits could be used for tracking individual users in terms of network usage and location, as well as building a picture of service usage through flow correlation. This talk describes an approach to packet-level addressing that provides enhanced protection against such privacy attacks. The approach only requires updates to the end-systems, works over existing networks and for existing applications, and can be deployed incrementally.
I will be helping out at the IETF Standards-in-Practice Workshop in Glasgow on 09 March 2026>. Register and come along!
An implementation of ILNP on FreeBSD 14.3 (amd64) is now available. This is a port of the initial release on FreeBSD 14.0, details of which can still be found here.
Come and say, "Hello", at NANOG96/San-Francisco! I will be giving a talk on recent results using ILNP for multihoming and multipath transport.
2026-02-28 update.
NANOG programme page.
Presentation:
video (YouTube) | slides
Abstract
There has long been a desire to have better support for multipath transport protocols to enable such capability as load distribution, resilience, mobile nodes & networks, better support for packet-level privacy and security, as well as other application areas. However, options for use of multipath transport protocols are currently limited for application developers and users. This talk presents some initial results in testing an implementation of multipath capability that can be controlled at the IP-layer from the end-systems using end-to-end signalling, and so could be applied to any transport protocol. A practical overview of the approach is given, based on an implementation in FreeBSD, including results from international connectivity tests conducted in November 2025 between IETF124/Montreal (Canada) and St Andrews (UK).
Come and say, "Hello", to us at IETF124/Montreal!. We will be at the Hackathon, and will have a demonstration set up throughout the week, including ILNP-enabled mulitpath transport and streaming video.
Hackathon:
Shubh Sinhal added additional support for ILNP in Wireshark.
Gregor Haywood's PhD work using ILNP for privacy in FreeBSD has won a national award!
Come and say, "Hello", to us at IETF123/Madrid!. We will be at the Hackathon, and will have a demonstration set up throughout the week.
Hackathon:
The DIGS project with partners netDEF, funded by the ICANN Grant Program, is up and running.
ICANN has announced the recipients of funding in the first round of the ICANN Grant Program, here.
Using NIDs as part of ILNP addressing helps improve flow privacy. The work in this paper is based on the prototype implementation of ILNP on FreeBSD 14.0 (see below).
- G. T. Haywood, S. N. Bhatti, Ephemeral Node Identifiers for Enhanced Flow Privacy. Future Internet, vol. 17, no. 5, pages 1-27. April 2025. Dataset is here.
Come and say, "Hello", to me at IETF122/Bangkok!. We will be at the Hackathon, and will have a demonstration set up throughout the week.
Hackathon:
ILNP allows a unified approach to enabling multihoming and mobility for increased flexibility in communication.
- R. Yanagida, S. N. Bhatti, Mobility–Multihoming Duality. Future Internet, vol. 16, no. 10, pages 1-42. October 2024. Dataset is here.
Using ILNP for flexible and dynamic multihoming and multipath allows protection of traffic from traffic analysis. The work in this paper is based on the prototype implementation of ILNP on FreeBSD 14.0 (see below).
- G. T. Haywood, S. N. Bhatti, Defence Against Side-Channel Attacks for Encrypted Network Communication Using Multiple Paths. Cryptography, vol. 8, no. 2, pages 1-26. May 2024. Dataset is here.
A prototype implementation of ILNP on FreeBSD 14.0 was tested and demonstrated at IETF118/Prague. Details of testing, including .pcap files for the communication exchange, as well as videos, can be found here.