Architectural and Vertical Privacy Protection (Problem Area Paper) Pedro Martinez-Julia and Antonio F. Skarmeta Department of Communication and Information Engineering University of Murcia, 30100, Murcia, Spain. {pedromj,skarmeta}@um.es Abstract. Although the current Internet provides many mechanisms to protect the privacy of users, when considering all the architectural elements, both horizontally and vertically, we find that there are many holes that can be used to disclose some private information. The Future Internet should overcome this problem by enabling privacy protection in both horizontal and vertical (interlayer) communications. Keywords: Architecture, Privacy, Identity, Future Internet 1 Introduction The current Internet model does not incorporate the security and privacy consid- erations from the beginning, leaving them to specific protocols and intermediate layers. Today, the Internet has become the common infrastructure used in our day-to-day communications, the place where we live our digital lives. This im- plies that there is a lot of private information circulating without specific access control and privacy considerations, as described in [3], ensuring confidentiality by encryption mechanisms but this is just a fix, not a general solution. Moreover, the enormous growth of the Internet, magnified by the rising of the Internet of Things [5], has exposed many challenges [1], that should be resolved for the Future Internet. However, the proposed approaches to resolve this problems will be exposed to new risks, mainly from the security and privacy points of view. To efficiently address this problem, the currently defined identity protection technologies should be strengthened and some (or many) of their methodologies should be applied to other network components and layers, not just the layers that specifically exchange identity information, but the other layers that may reveal the identity of a user. Thus, the Future Internet requires a specific mech- anism, such as the Identity Plane we propose in this paper, to virtually and logically centralize the access control to private information. In this paper we defend the necessity of such mechanism and describe its overall behavior and its interaction with other elements and layers (planes) of the network. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we discuss the privacy protection problem. In Section 3 we describe the architectural so- lutions that should be taken into account for the Future Internet. Finally, in Section 4 we conclude this (problem area) paper.