NetSANI: Network Trace Sanitization and ANonymization Infrastructure

Project Summary

This project aims to increase network-trace sharing by making it safer and easier to sanitize network traces. Sanitization always involves a challenging trade-off between sanitization effectiveness (providing anonymity for network users and secrecy for network operational information) and research usefulness (since only the information retained can be used by the researcher).

To this end, the project will develop and release NetSANI (Network Trace Sanitization and ANonymization Infrastructure), a flexible and extensible suite of software tools for sanitizing network traces, based on user-specified sanitization goals and user-specified research goals.   The tools will be verified on extensive traces collected at Dartmouth College, and evaluated by providing early releases to external collaborators who will test the tools on their traces.

The NetSANI project expects that  (a) better tools will enable and encourage more network-trace sharing, which helps the research community do better research, (b) better access to network traces will help companies develop better network products, and (c) better anonymization methods will protect network users' privacy.

• Principal Investigator: David Kotz, Department of Computer Science
• Project Researchers
• Project Publications
• Funding: NSF Cyber Trust