Re-Thinking Network Monitoring in End-to-End Encrypted Environments: Visibility, Security, and Privacy Trade-offs
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Abstract
End-to-end encryption (E2EE) has become increasingly prevalent across modern digital communications, significantly enhancing user privacy and data security. However, this widespread adoption poses significant challenges for traditional network monitoring, which has historically relied on payload inspection to identify threats, performance issues, and policy violations. This paper re-examines the role of network monitoring in E2EE-dominated environments, exploring the inherent trade-offs among visibility, security, and privacy. We analyse limitations of conventional approaches and discuss emerging alternatives, such as traffic metadata analysis, machine learning-based classification, and encrypted traffic feature extraction (Liu et al., 2025), that aim to infer meaningful insights without decrypting content (Baldini et al., 2020). Additionally, we address the ethical and legal implications of increased inspection tactics, emphasising the need for privacy-preserving mechanisms that balance organisational security needs with individuals’ rights to confidentiality. By proposing a structured framework for evaluating monitoring strategies under encryption constraints, this work contributes a holistic perspective to the design of next-generation network observability tools that reconcile security demands with privacy principles.
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References
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