α-MON: Anonymized Passive Traffic Monitoring

Packet measurements are essential for several applications, such as cyber-security, accounting and troubleshooting. They, however, threaten privacy by exposing sensitive information. Anonymization has been the answer to this challenge, i.e., replacing sensitive information by obfuscated copies. Anonymization of packet traces, however, comes with some drawbacks. First, it reduces the value of data. Second, it requires to consider diverse protocols because information may leak from many nonencrypted fields. Third, it must be performed at high speeds directly at the monitor, to prevent private data from leaking, calling for real-time solutions. We present alpha-MON, a flexible tool for privacy-preserving packet monitoring. It replicates input packet streams to different consumers while anonymizing values according to flexible policies that cover all protocol layers. Beside classic anonymization mechanisms such as IP address obfuscation, alpha-MON supports alpha-anonymization, a novel solution to obfuscate values that can be uniquely traced back to limited sets of users. Differently from classic anonymization approaches, alpha-anonymity works on a streaming fashion, with zero delay, operating at high-speed links on a packet-by-packet basis. We evaluate alpha-MON performance using packet traces collected from an ISP network. Results show that it enables alpha-anonymity in real-time. alpha-MON is available to the community as an open-source project.