A Real-Time Processing System for Anonymization of Mobile Core Network Traffic

Abstract

With the advancement of mobile telecommunication technologies, the effective mining of user data is regard as an very important requirement. However, due to the original data may contain sensitive information about individuals, sharing user dataset can lead to serious privacy breaches, such as the notorious scandal, the privacy leakage of American on Line (AOL). Up to now, there are already existing several available tools or libraries for packet anonymization, like PktAnon, Anonym, Pcaplib. But little research has actually gone into supporting packets in high speed mobile core network which contains several packet encapsulation structure. In this paper, we propose a real-time processing system called ANTW for providing packet anonymization on mobile core network. It involves two mechanisms: First, real-time packet processing, such as decapsulation, decompression and PPP character unescape. Second, packet anonymization which protects the privacy in the sensitive fields of each packet while preserving the utility. We evaluated the performance and availability of ANTW over a wide-area real network. Evaluation results indicate that our system can achieve more than 10 Gbps.