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International Conference on Passive and Active Network Measurement

PAM 2018: Passive and Active Measurement pp 73–84Cite as

Revisiting the Privacy Implications of Two-Way Internet Latency Data

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 10771))

Abstract

The Internet measurement community is increasingly sensitive to the privacy implications of both active and passive measurement. Research into the drawbacks of network data anonymization has led the community to investigate data sharing techniques, as well as to focus on active measurements and active measurement datasets. A key metric in these datasets is round-trip-time (RTT) as measured e.g. by ping or traceroute. This paper examines the assumption that the analysis of Internet RTT data is safe for open research by posing the question: what potentually-private inferences can be made about a remote target given periodic latency measurements from known vantage points under one’s control? We explore the risks to end-user privacy both through a review of diverse literature touching on the subject as well as on the analysis of RTT data from fixed and mobile Internet measurement infrastruture. While we find that the common assumption of safety generally holds, we explore caveats and give recommendations for mitigation in those cases where it may not.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    e.g. the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); see http://www.eugdpr.org.

  2. 2.

    https://atlas.ripe.net.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/mami-project/rtt-privacy-paper.

  4. 4.

    Here, the reasoning is that such pairs are either colocated in the same rack, or possible connected to the same local- or metropolitan-area network, and as such do not accurately reflect Internet RTT measurement.

  5. 5.

    As retrieved from https://stat.ripe.net on 10 October 2017.

  6. 6.

    MONROE nodes provide GPS metadata for mobile nodes for location ground truth. We split MONROE data from 1 September 2017 into 5 min bins (300 pings) and associated the geographic average GPS location with the minimum RTT in each bin to yield 3,863 samples from 45 nodes.

  7. 7.

    https://pingme.pto.mami-project.eu.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to RIPE for making Atlas available to the research community, and to the MONROE project for access to the mobile dataset used in this work. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers and our shepherd, Ramakrishna Padmanabhan, for comments improving the organization and focus of this paper. Thanks also to the members of the IETF QUIC Working Group RTT Design Team for the discussions leading to this paper. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 688421, and was supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) under contract number 15.0268. The opinions expressed and arguments employed reflect only the authors’ views, and not those of the European Commission or the Swiss Government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Networked Systems Group, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Brian Trammell & Mirja Kühlewind

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  1. Brian Trammell
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  2. Mirja Kühlewind
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Correspondence to Brian Trammell .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, USA

    Robert Beverly

  2. Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Georgios Smaragdakis

  3. Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Anja Feldmann

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Trammell, B., Kühlewind, M. (2018). Revisiting the Privacy Implications of Two-Way Internet Latency Data. In: Beverly, R., Smaragdakis, G., Feldmann, A. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10771. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76481-8_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76481-8_6

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