[tjgq]

In the absence of a firewall, you are correct that any node that gets hold of the publicly routable address assigned to one of your devices will be able to communicate with it from the outside. This is indeed a problem for most users, who won't know or bother to configure one; ISPs should do it for them on the CPE.

Regarding the tracking of specific users: RFC 3041 stateless autoconfiguration (which is deployed at least on Linux and OSX - not sure about Windows) allows a device to switch to a new random IPv6 address within its assigned prefix every few minutes. This mitigates, though it does not eliminate, an attacker's ability to correlate connections originating from the same device over a period of time.

Naturally, all of those addresses will share a common IPv6 prefix. But that is no different from most residential NATs, where all connections are observed from the outside to originate from the same IPv4 address.

Also due to stateless autoconfiguration, guessing the address of a device from the outside is equivalent to finding a needle in a 2^64-straw haystack. It's not impossible, but it takes time and a lot of traffic to do so.

[hackuser]

Thank you!