A Flow-Level Architecture for Balancing Accountability and Privacy

With the rapid development of the Internet, flow-based approach has attracted more and more attention. To this end, this paper presents a new and efficient architecture to balance accountability and privacy based on network flows. A self-certifying identifier is proposed to efficiently identify a flow. In addition, a delegate-registry cooperation scheme and a multi-delegate mechanism are developed to ensure users' privacy. The effectiveness and overhead of the proposed architecture are evaluated by virtue of the real trace collected from an Internet service provider. The experimental results show that our architecture can achieve a better network performance in terms of lower resource consumption, lower response time, and higher stability.