Secret-Sharing Hardware Improves the Privacy of Network Monitoring Johannes Wolkerstorfer (Telecommunications Research Center Vienna, Austria). |
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Network service providers
monitor the data flow to detect anomalies and malicious behavior in
their networks. Network monitoring inspects the data flow over time
and thus has to store packet data. Storing of data impedes the privacy
of users. A radically new approach counteracts such privacy concerns
by exploiting threshold cryptography. It encrypts all monitored
traffic. The used symmetric keys are made available to monitoring
entities only if they collect enough evidence of malicious behavior.
This new approach overcomes weaknesses of packet anonymization. It
calls for dedicated hardware that is able to encrypt packets and
generate key-share information for gigabit networks. This article
proves that the application of Shamir's secret sharing scheme is
possible. The presented hardware is able to protect up to 1.8 million
packets per second. The creation of such a high-speed hardware
required innovations on the algorithmic, the protocol, and on the
architectural level. The outcome is a surprisingly small circuit that
fits commercially available FPGA cards. It was tested under real-world
conditions. It proved to protect the users' privacy while monitoring
gigabit networks.
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Keywords: Secret Sharing, Threshold Cryptography, Hardware Acceleration, Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), Gigabit Ethernet. |