On the design of fast prefix-preserving IP address anonymization scheme

Abstract

Traffic traces are generally anonymized before used in analysis. Prefix-preserving anonymization is often used to avoid privacy issues as well as preserve prefix relationship after anonymization. To facilitate research on real time high speed network traffic, address anonymization algorithm should be fast and consistent. In this paper, the bit string based algorithm and the embedded bit string algorithm will be introduced. Bit string based algorithm uses precomputed bit string to improve the anonymization performance. Instead of only using the LSB of each Rijndael output, the embedded bit string algorithm will take advantage of the full size Rijndael output to anonymize several bits at the same time. The implementation can be downloaded from https://sourceforge. net/projects/ipanon. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.