SecureNT: Smart Topology Obfuscation for Privacy-Aware Network Monitoring

Abstract: Network tomography plays a crucial role in network monitoring and management, where network topology serves as the fundamental basis for various tomography tasks including traffic matrix estimation and link performance inference. The topology information, however, can be inferred through end-to-end measurements using various inference algorithms, posing significant security risks to network infrastructure. While existing protection methods attempt to secure topology information by modifying end-to-end measurements, they often require complex computation and sophisticated modification strategies, making real-time protection challenging. Moreover, these modifications typically render the measurements unusable for network monitoring, even by trusted users. This paper presents a novel privacy-preserving framework that addresses these limitations. Our approach provides efficient topology protection while maintaining the utility of measurements for authorized network monitoring. Through extensive evaluation on both simulated and real-world networks, we demonstrate that our framework achieves superior privacy protection compared to existing methods while enabling trusted users to effectively monitor network performance. Our solution offers a practical approach for organizations to protect sensitive topology information without sacrificing their network monitoring capabilities.