Identities correlation infrastructure for passive network monitoring

摘要

User names and user groups serve as the basis of a formal policy in a network. A passive monitor examines network traffic in near real time and indicates: which network traffic is flowing on the network as before; which users or user groups were logged into workstations initiating this network traffic; and which of this traffic conforms to the formal policy definition. In one embodiment of the invention, users and user groups are determined by querying Microsoft® Active Directory and Microsoft® Windows servers, to determine who is logged onto the Microsoft® network. Other sources of identity information are also possible. The identity information is then correlated with the network traffic, so that even traffic that does not bear on the Microsoft® networking scheme is still tagged with identity