Towards Practical Avoidance of Information Leakage in Enterprise Networks

Preventing exfiltration of sensitive data is a central challenge facing many modern networking environments. In this paper, we propose a network-wide method of confining and controlling the flow of sensitive data within a network. Our approach is based on black-box differencing – we run two logical copies of the network, one with private data scrubbed, and compare outputs of the two to determine if and when private data is being leaked. To ensure outputs of the two copies match, we build upon recent advances that enable computing systems to execute deterministically at scale and with low overheads. We believe our approach could be a useful building block towards building general-purpose schemes that leverage black-box differencing to mitigate leakage of private data.