A multi-resolution accountable logging and its applications

Today's computer and network systems were not originally designed for accountability which plays a crucial role in information assurance systems. To assure accountability, each entity in the system should be held responsible for its own behaviors so that the entity is part of larger chains of the system's accountability. To achieve accountable logging, a flow-net methodology was proposed in our previous work. Moreover, the multi-layer feature of computer and network systems brings us the chance to achieve multiple degrees of accountability, which means that we are able to acknowledge the system's behaviors at different levels of accountability. To achieve multiple degrees of accountability, we propose designs of a multi-resolution flow-net scheme in this paper and find out the optimal design under different assumptions. Furthermore, we apply the multi-resolution flow-net on TCP/IP networks that are designed and organized with multiple layers. Finally, evaluation results are presented to verify the better performance provided by multi-resolution flow-net than other schemes.