Cryptographic signatures on the network layer - an alternative to the ISP data retention

Insecurity of the Internet has led to data retention legislations where user's private data is stored for months or years. Such an approach has significant cost, privacy and security issues. In this paper we propose an alternative way for providing the security and accountability on the Internet by using the Packet Level Authentication (PLA) protocol and perpacket cryptographic signatures. We examine security and privacy properties of our solution. Our analysis shows that using cryptographic identities and signatures on the network level removes the need for costly data retention and actually improves the privacy of users.