Critter@home: Content-Rich Traffic Trace Repository from Real-Time, Anonymous, User Contributions

Members

Overview

Critter@home is a project to connect researchers to content-rich data from anonymous Internet end-users. Our goal is to facilitate the safe sharing of data and provide a platform for end-users to contribute data and be part of the research process.

Problem Statement:

Networking and cybersecurity research critically need publicly available, fresh and diverse application-level data, for data mining and for validation.

• There are very few publicly available network traces that contain application-level data.
• Abailable data is outdated and contains very specific data useful only to some researchers.

Key Insights

Critter@home is a continuously updated archive of content-rich network data, contributed by volunteer users. Data contributors join the Critter overlay whenever online, offering their data to interested researchers. Privacy of data contributors is protected in multiple ways:

• Contributors have the option of hosting their own data locally, thus retaining full control over it.
• Before data is stored, it is modified via a PPI-sanitization process to replace all personal and private information (PPI).
• Data is always stored and transmitted in an encrypted format.
• No human apart from the contributor will ever access the raw, PPI-sanitized, data. Instead, researchers access data via a query system which only returns aggregate statistics.
• All contact with a contributor is at her discretion and is done via an anonymizing network where contributor identities are hidden both from researchers and the Internet at large.
• Contributors (if they so desire) can have full, fine-grained control over their data at all times via policy settings.

Our work relies in part on the secure query framework called Patrol, developed by PI Mirkovic under another NSF-funded project. This framework allows only for queries about aggregate features of the data, such as counts, distributions, etc. and preserves user privacy by applying k-anonymity and l-diversity principles.

Critter@home Architechture

The Query Process

A query submitted to Critter will go through a five step process illustrated below.

1. A researcher submits a query via the public portal.
2. Critter clients connect and poll for new queries via an anonymizing network.
3. The researcher's stored query is sent to clients.
4. Patrol processes the query if the Query Policy permits, and returns encrypted results along with information on how a contributor wants its response aggregated.
5. Aggregated results are stored and can be retrieved.

Software

• Critter@Home Client
• Community Research Portal is now retired

Publications