Intentional Network Monitoring: Finding the Needle without Capturing the Haystack

Monitoring network traffic serves many purposes, from security to accounting, yet current mechanisms for collecting network traffic are typically based on low-level features of network traffic (e.g., IP addresses, port numbers), rather than characteristics that more closely map to intent (e.g., people, applications, or devices). In this paper, we present the case for intentional network monitoring---the practice of capturing the minimal set of traffic that satisfies the operator's monitoring intent or goal---and a preliminary design and implementation for NetAssay, a system that enables intentional monitoring. A significant challenge in developing NetAssay is developing a runtime that can maintain a mapping between stable abstractions that an operator or programmer might use to express intent (e.g., a username) and the dynamic, heterogeneous data that establishes these associations (e.g., information from a login server or DNS record). We present examples that show how the NetAssay runtime can perform late binding between these mappings and network flow space and discuss the research and technical challenges associated with establishing more general late-binding mechanisms.