Flow-net methodology for accountability in wireless networks

• Authors: Yang Xiao
• Venue: IEEE Network: The Magazine of Global Internetworking
• Year: 2009

Accountability implies that any entity should be held responsible for its own specific action or behavior so that the entity is part of larger chains of accountability. One of the goals of accountability is that once an event has transpired, the events that took place are traceable so that the causes can be determined afterward. The poor accountability provided by today's computers and networks wastes a great deal of money and effort; examples include activities to identify whether a system is under reconnaissance or attack, and the difficulties of distinguishing legitimate emails from phishing attacks. This is due to the simple fact that today's computing and network infrastructure was not built with accountability in mind. In this article we propose a novel methodology called flow-net for accountability. We apply this methodology to media access control and routing layers in wireless networks. We then compare the performance of flow-net with audit log files. This article presents a novel approach for traffic data collection that can also be used for forensics and intrusion detection purposes.