Safe And Flexible Experimental Dataset Access and Sharing--Planning (SAFED-ASP)

Project Description

The SAFED-ASP Project (IMR: RI-P: Safe And Flexible Experimental Dataset Access and Sharing–Planning) is an NSF planning grant as part of the Internet Measurement Research Program. This planning grant will work towards new methods to support federated data sharing while managing privacy. This work will be critical to inform new research in protocol design, cybersecurity, and privacy with real-world data. However, privacy requirements make network data difficult to share for several reasons: (1) Data should be anonymized, but to retain research value, that anonymization may require customization. (2) Data may require explicit agreements between researchers and data providers, agreements can augment anonymization and make expectations explicit. (3) Data providers and sponsors need to track data use to demonstrate and understand data utility and support data expiration. This project will conduct outreach to understand community requirements in these areas, and will prototype methods and software to manage the lifecycle of dataset request approval, distribution, and evaluation.

We expect to develop a roadmap for open-source software that will support the lifecycle of dataset distribution. This lifecycle includes metadata management, efficient handling of datasets request and approvals, and flexible dataset fulfillment. We envision open-source software to support these activities, and a federated community of dataset providers that either self-host or use a shared platform.

The broader impact of our work is to pave the way to new approaches that will will reduce friction in data sharing and improve data handling responsibility and transparency. Broader dataset availability is key to applying machine learning and big-data techniques to networking and security problems.

We expect to make our platform and software available as it is developed and as it matures through a full proposal. We expect the tools we develop to be hosted by us and to suitable for self-hosting.

Support

SAFED-ASP is supported by NSF/CISE as a CISE IMR award CNS-2224467.

People

John Heidemann, PI on this project, project leader and professor (USC/ISI)
Yuri Pradkin, researcher (USC/ISI)

Publications

For related publications, please see the ANT publications web page.

Events

We are planning to hold a workshop in 2023.

Software

Datasets

We make all datasets available through our dataset page.