Abstract |
Lack of trust is one of the main reasons for limited cooperation between different organizations. Private data is of paramount importance to administrators and organizations, which are reluctant to cooperate between each other and exchange network traffic traces. The main reasons behind this reluctance to exchange monitoring data are protecting users privacy and the fear of infrastructure information leakage. Anonymization is a technique that can be used to overcome this reluctance and enhance the cooperation between different organizations with the smooth exchange of monitored data. Anonymization is performed by altering data in such a way that private data and sensitive information are removed. Today, several organizations provide network traffic traces that are anonymized by software utilities or ad-hoc solutions that offer limited flexibility. The result of this approach is the creation of unrealistic traces, inappropriate for use in evaluation experiments. Furthermore, the need for fast on-line anonymization has recently emerged as cooperative defence mechanisms have to share network traffic. Our effort focuses on the design and implementation of a generic and flexible anonymization framework that provides extended functionality, covering multiple aspects of anonymization needs, and allows fine-tuning of the privacy protection level. The core of the proposed framework is based on AAPI, a flexible and expressive anonymization application programming interface.
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