Model-driven software engineering in practice: privacy-enhanced filtering of network traffic

Network traffic data contains a wealth of information for use in security analysis and application development. Unfortunately, it also usually contains confidential or otherwise sensitive information, prohibiting sharing and analysis. Existing automated anonymization solutions are hard to maintain and tend to be outdated. We present Privacy-Enhanced Filtering (PEF), a model-driven prototype framework that relies on declarative descriptions of protocols and a set of filter rules, which are used to automatically transform network traffic data to remove sensitive information. This paper discusses the design, implementation and application of PEF, which is available as open-source software and configured for use in a typical malware detection scenario.