Application based meta tagging of network connections

Modern operating systems offer a large array of features in their network subsystems that support fine-grained access control, monitoring and accounting. Such features allow a system administrator to account and filter outgoing network connections based on attributes such as the destination IP address and port number of the connection. With the increase in multi-user systems such as grid networks and shared Web hosting, the complexity of these tasks has increased. Current operating systems lack the ability to determine the intent of a network connection based on the connection's technical characteristics alone. This paper presents a new mechanism by which applications themselves are given the ability to pass meta information to the network subsystem, allowing it to take advantage of application specific data.