POSTER: An online prefix-preserving IP address anonymization algorithm for passive measurement systems

Abstract

To strike a balance between usefulness of network traces and privacy protection, offline prefix-preserving anonymization has been studied extensively to anoymize IP addresses while preserving their prefix nature. In this paper, a novel Dynamic Subtree-scheduling Packet Anonymization scheme called DS-PAn is developed for measurement systems based on the prefix-preserving algorithm Crypto-PAn. DS-PAn makes online anoymization practical to be operated at a high rate, while using less memory compared to precomputed Crypto-PAn. Performance evaluations validate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional anonymization mechanism in terms of computation speed as well as memory requirement.