Category: Presentations

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new animation: eight years of Internet IPv4 Censuses

We’ve been taking Internet IPv4 censuses regularly since 2006.  In each census, we probe the entire allocated IPv4 address space.  You may browse 8 years of data at our IPv4 address browser.

A still image from our animation of 8 years of IPv4 censuses.
A still image from our animation of 8 years of IPv4 censuses.

We recently put together an animation showing 8 years of IPv4 censuses, from 2006 through 2014.

These eight years show some interesting events, from an early “open” Internet in 2006, to full allocation of IPv4 by ICANN in 2011, to higher utilization in 2014.

All data shown here can be browsed at our website.
Data is available for research use from PREDICT or by request from us if PREDICT access is not possible.

This animation was first shown at the Dec. 2014 DHS Cyber Security Division R&D Showcase and Technical Workshop as part of the talk “Towards Understanding Internet Reliability” given by John Heidemann.  This work was supported by DHS, most recently through the LACREND project.

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new talk “Internet Populations (Good and Bad): Measurement, Estimation, and Correlation” at the ICERM Workshop on Cybersecurity

John Heidemann gave the talk “Internet Populations (Good and Bad): Measurement, Estimation, and Correlation” at the ICERM Workshop on Cybersecurity at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island on October 22, 2014. Slides are available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann14e/.

Can we improve the mathematical tools we use to measure and understand the Internet?
Can we improve the mathematical tools we use to measure and understand the Internet?

From the abstract:

Our research studies the Internet’s public face. Since 2006 we have been taking censuses of the Internet address space (pinging all IPv4 addresses) every 3 months. Since 2012 we have studied network outages and events like Hurricane Sandy, using probes of much of the Internet every 11 minutes. Most recently we have evaluated the diurnal Internet, finding countries where most people turn off their computers at night. Finally, we have looked at network reputation, identifying how spam generation correlates with network location, and others have studies multiple measurements of “network reputation”.

A common theme across this work is one must estimate characteristics of the edge of the Internet in spite of noisy measurements and a underlying changes. One also need to compare and correlate these imperfect measurements with other factors (from GDP to telecommunications policies).

How do these applications relate to the mathematics of census taking and measurement, estimation, and correlation? Are there tools we should be using that we aren’t? Do the properties of the Internet suggest new approaches (for example where rapid full enumeration is possible)? Does correlation and estimates of network “badness” help us improve cybersecurity by treating different parts of the network differently?

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new animation “Watching the Internet Sleep”

Does the Internet sleep? Yes, and we have the video!

We have recently put together a video showing 35 days of Internet address usage as observed from Trinocular, our outage detection system.

The Internet sleeps: address use in South America is low (blue) in the early morning, while India is high (red) in afternoon.
The Internet sleeps: address use in South America is low (blue) in the early morning, while India is high (red) in afternoon.

The Internet sleeps: address use in South America is low (blue) in the early morning, while India is high (red) in afternoon.  When we look at address usage over time, we see that some parts of the globe have daily swings of +/-10% to 20% in the number of active addresses. In China, India, eastern Europe and much of South America, the Internet sleeps.

Understanding when the Internet sleeps is important to understand how different country’s network policies affect use, it is part of outage detection, and it is a piece of improving our long-term goal of understanding exactly how big the Internet is.

See http://www.isi.edu/ant/diurnal/ for the video, or read our technical paper “When the Internet Sleeps: Correlating Diurnal Networks With External Factors” by Quan, Heidemann, and Pradkin, to appear at ACM IMC, Nov. 2014.

Datasets (listed here) used in generating this video are available.

This work is partly supported by DHS S&T, Cyber Security division, agreement FA8750-12-2-0344 (under AFRL) and N66001-13-C-3001 (under SPAWAR).  The views contained
herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of DHS or the U.S. Government.  This work was classified by USC’s IRB as non-human subjects research (IIR00001648).

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new talk “Measuring DANE TLSA Deployment” given at DNS-OARC

Liang Zhu gave the talk “Measuring DANE TLSA Deployment”, given at the Fall DNS-OARC meeting in Los Angeles, California on Oct 12, 2014.  Slides are available: http://www.isi.edu/~liangzhu/presentation/dns-oarc/dane_tlsa_survey.pdf

From the abstract:

The DANE (DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities) framework uses DNSSEC to provide a source of trust, and with TLSA it can serve as a root of trust for TLS certificates. This alternative to traditional certificate authorities is important given the risks inherent in trusting hundreds of organizations—risks already demonstrated with multiple compromises. The TLSA protocol was published in 2012, and this talk presents the first systematic study of its deployment. We studied TLSA usage, developing a tool that actively probes all signed zones in .com and .net for TLSA records. We find the TLSA use is early: in our latest measurement, of the 461k signed zones, we find only 701 TLSA names. We characterize how it is being used so far, and find that around 7–12% of TLSA records are invalid. We find 31% of TLSA responses are larger than 1500 Bytes and get IP fragmented.

The work in the talk is by Liang Zhu (USC/ISI), Duane Wessels and Allison Mankin (both of Verisign), and John Heidemann (USC/ISI).

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new talk “T-DNS: Connection-Oriented DNS to Improve Privacy and Security” given at DNS-OARC

John Heidemann gave the talk “T-DNS: Connection-Oriented DNS to Improve Privacy and Security” given at the Spring DNS-OARC meeting in Warsaw, Poland on May 10, 2014.  Slides are available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann14c.html.

don't fear connections for DNS
don’t fear connections for DNS

From the abstract:

This talk will discuss connection-oriented DNS to improve DNS security and privacy. DNS is the canonical example of a connectionless, single packet, request/response protocol, with UDP as its dominant transport. Yet DNS today is challenged by eavesdropping that compromises privacy, source-address spoofing that results in denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on the server and third parties, injection attacks that exploit fragmentation, and size limitations that constrain policy and operational choices. We propose t-DNS to address these problems: it uses TCP to smoothly support large payloads and mitigate spoofing and amplification for DoS. T-DNS uses transport-layer security (TLS) to provide privacy from users to their DNS resolvers and optionally to authoritative servers.

Traditional wisdom is that connection setup will balloon latency for clients and overwhelm servers. We provide data to show that these assumptions are overblown–our model of end-to-end latency shows TLS to the recursive resolver is only about 5-24% slower, with UDP to the authoritative server. End-to-end latency is 19-33% slower with TLS to recursive and TCP to authoritative. Experiments behind these models show that after connection establishment, TCP and TLS latency is equivalent to UDP. Using diverse trace data we show that frequent connection reuse is possible (60-95% for stub and recursive resolvers, although half that for authoritative servers). With conservative timeouts (20 s at authoritative servers and 60 s elsewhere) we show that : a large recursive resolver may have 25k active connections consuming about 9 GB of RAM. These results depend on specific design and implementation decisions–query pipelining, out-of-order responses, TLS connection resumption, and plausible timeouts.

We hope to solicit feedback from the OARC community about this work to understand design and operational concerns if T-DNS deployment was widespread. The work in the talk is by Liang Zhu, Zi Hu, and John Heidemann (all of USC/ISI), Duane Wessels and Allison Mankin (both of Verisign), and Nikita Somaiya (USC/ISI).

A technical report describing the work is at http://www.isi.edu/ johnh/PAPERS/Zhu14a.pdf and the protocol changes are described ashttp://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hzhwm-start-tls-for-dns/.

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new video “A Retrospective on an Australian Routing Event”

On 2012-02-23, hardware problems in an Australian ISP (Dodo) router caused it to announce many global routes to their ISP (Telstra), and from there to others.

The result: for 45 minutes, millions of Australians lost international Internet connectivity.

While this problem was detected and corrected in less than an hour, this kind of problem can reoccur.

In this video we show the Internet address space (IPv4) from Sydney, Australia.   Colors show estimated physical location (blue: North America, Red: Europe, Green: Asia).   Addresses map to a Hilbert Curve, and nearby addresses form squares.  White boxes show routing changes, with bursts after 02:40 UTC.

In the visualization we see there are many, many routing changes for much of Internet (the many white boxes)–evidence of routing instability in Sydney.

A copy of this video is also available at Vimeo (some system may have problems viewing the above embedded video, but Vimeo is a good alternative).

This video was made by Kaustubh Gadkari, John Heidemann, Cathie Olschanowsky, Christos Papadopoulos, Yuri Pradkin, and Lawrence Weikum at University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI) and Colorado State University/Computer Science (CSU).

This video uses software developed at USC/ISI and CSU:  Retro-future Time Travel, the LANDER IPv4 Web Address Browser, and BGPMon, the BGP logging and monitor.  Data from this video is available from BGPMon and PREDICT (or the authors).

This work was supported by DHS S&T (BGPMon, contract N66001-08-C-2028; LANDER, contract D08PC75599, admin. by SPAWAR; LACREND, contract FA8750-12-2-0344, admin. by AFRL; Retro-future, contract N66001-13-C-3001, admin. by SPAWAR), and NSF/CISE (BGPMon, grant CNS-1305404).  Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of funding and administrative agencies.

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keynote “Sharing Network Data: Bright Gray Days Ahead” given at Passive and Active Measurement Conference

I’m honored to have been invited to give the keynote talk “Sharing Network Data: Bright Gray Days Ahead” at the Passive and  Active Measurement Conference 2014 in Marina del Rey.

A copy of the talk slides are at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann14b (pdf)

some brighter alternatives
Some alternatives, perhaps brighter than the gray of standard anonymization.

From the talk’s abstract:

Sharing data is what we expect as a community. From the IMC best paper award requiring a public dataset to NSF data management plans, we know that data is crucial to reproducible science. Yet privacy concerns today make data acquisition difficult and sharing harder still. AOL and Netflix have released anonymized datasets that leaked customer information, at least for a few customers and with some effort. With the EU suggesting that IP addresses are personally identifiable information, are we doomed to IP-address free “Internet” datasets?
In this talk I will explore the issues in data sharing, suggesting that we need to move beyond black and white definitions of private and public datasets, to embrace the gray shades of data sharing in our future. Gray need not be gloomy. I will discuss some new ideas in sharing that suggest that, if we move beyond “anonymous ftp” as our definition, the future may be gray but bright.

This talk did not generate new datasets, but it grows out of our experiences distributing data through several research projects (such as LANDER and LACREND, both part of the DHS PREDICT program) mentioned in the talk with data available http://www.isi.edu/ant/traces/.  This talk represents my on opinions, not those of these projects or their sponsors.

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New Poster “Poster Abstract: Towards Active Measurements of Edge Network Outages” in PAM 2013

Lin Quan presented our outage work: “Poster Abstract: Towards Active Measurements of Edge Network Outages” at the PAM 2013 conference. Poster abstract is available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Quan13a/index.html

pam_poster

End-to-end reachability is a fundamental service of the Internet. We study network outages caused by natural disasters, and political upheavals. We propose a new approach to outage detection using active probing. Like prior outage detection methods, our method uses ICMP echo requests (“pings”) to detect outages, but we probe with greater density and ner granularity, showing pings can detect outages without supplemental probing. The main contribution of our work is to de ne how to interpret pings as outages: defi ning an outage as a sharp change in block responsiveness relative to recent behavior. We also provide preliminary analysis of outage rate in the Internet edge. Space constrains this poster abstract to only sketches of our approach; details and validation are in our technical report. Our data is available at no charge, see http://www.isi.edu/ant/traces/internet_outages/.

This work is based on our technical report: http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Quan12a/index.html, joint work by Lin Quan, John Heidemann and Yuri Pradkin.

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new talk “Long-term Data Collection and Analysis of Outages at the Edge” given at the AIMS workshop

John Heidemann gave the talk “Long-term Data Collection and Analysis of Outages at the Edge” at UCSD, San Diego, California on Feb. 8, 2013 as part of the CAIDA Active Internet Measurement Systems (AIMS) Workshop.  Slides are available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann13e.html.

talk_icon

This talk describes our analysis of outages in edge networks at the time of Hurricane Sandy, and how that work was enabled by long-term data collection. The analysis showed U.S. networks had double the outage rate (from 0.2% to 0.4%) on 2012-10-30, the day after Sandy landfall, and recovered after four days. We highlighted long-term data collection of Internet Surveys, a random sample of about 41,000 /24 blocks, and the characteristics that make that data suitable for re-analysis. The talk was part of the CAIDA Workshop on Active Internet Measurement Systems, hosted at UCSD.

This work is based on our recent technical report   “A Preliminary Analysis of Network Outages During Hurricane Sandy“, joint work of John Heidemann, Lin Quan, and Yuri Pradkin.

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new abstract “Third-Party Measurement of Network Outages in Hurricane Sandy” and talk with video at FCC Workshop on Network Resiliency

We recently posted our abstract “Third-Party Measurement of Network Outages in Hurricane Sandy” at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann13c.html and the talk “Active Probing of Edge Networks: Hurricane Sandy and Beyond” at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann13d.html

These were part of the FCC Workshop on Network Resiliency at Brooklyn Law College, Brooklyn, NY on Feb. 6, 2013, chaired by Henning Schulzrinne.

Video from our talk and for the whole workshop is on YouTube.

fcc_youtube

A summary of the talk:

This talk summarized our analysis of outages in edge networks at the time of Hurricane Sandy. This analysis showed U.S. networks had double the outage rate (from 0.2% to 0.4%) on 2012-10-30, the day after Sandy landfall, and recovered after four days. It also describes our goal of tracking all outages in the Internet. The talk was part of the FCC workshop on Network Resiliency, hosted at Brooklyn Law College by Henning Schulzrinne.

This work is based on our recent technical report   “A Preliminary Analysis of Network Outages During Hurricane Sandy“, joint work of John Heidemann, Lin Quan, and Yuri Pradkin.