DPMon: A differentially-private query engine for passive measurements

Passive monitoring is a network measurement technique that analyzes the traffic carried by an operational network. It has several applications for traffic engineering, Quality of Experience monitoring and cyber security. However, it entails the processing of personal information, thus, threatening users’ privacy. In this work, we propose DPMon, a tool to run privacy-preserving queries to a dataset of passive network measurements. It exploits differential privacy to perturb the output of the query to preserve users’ privacy. DPMon can exploit big data infrastructures running Apache Spark and operate on different data formats. We show that DPMon allows extracting meaningful insights from the data, while at the same time controlling the amount of disclosed information.