Fast restorable prefix-preserving IP address anonymization for IPv4/IPv6

Abstract

To protect the privacy of end users and the security of networks, prefix-preserving anonymization has been proposed before traffic traces being made publicly available by data providers. However, existing anonymization algorithms don't perform well for IPv6 address anonymization and many of these anonymization schemes don't have corresponding reversible algorithms which are necessary because sometimes the traces owners want to know the original information from the research results when serious attacks happened. In this paper, we propose a fast restorable anonymization algorithm (FRAA) based on divisional anonymization scheme and use reversible tree for recovery as well as a reference model for traffic traces publishing. We further analyze the security properties of FRAA and compare its performance against previous well known studies. Experimental results show that FRAA performs better for both internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) and internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) anonymization and the recovery process of FRAA has the same computation complexity with the anonymization process. With the reference model, traffic traces owner can make traffic traces publicly in a reliable and secure way.