Towards a Privacy Preserving Data Flow Control via Packet Header Marking

Internet infrastructure is becoming ubiquitous thanks to the advancement in computing and the network domain. Reliable network communication is essential to offer good quality services, but it is not trivial. There are privacy concerns. Metadata may leak user information, even if traffic is encrypted. Some countries have data privacy preserving-related regulations, but end-users cannot control how their data packets should travel through networks. Even worse, the user cannot declare their privacy preferences. This paper presents an approach to tackle such privacy issues through data privacy-aware routing, where users can specify their preferences for packet routing using marking and filtering. Routing can work according to such specifications. It is implemented by P4, allowing a vendor-independent realisation with standard off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software components. We presented the initial experimental results of a proof-of-concept test on a unified cloud/foe research testbed.