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Papers Publications

new conference paper “Towards Characterizing International Routing Detours” in AINTEC 2016

The paper “Towards Characterizing International Routing Detours” appeared in the 12th Asian Internet Engineering Conference on Dec 1, 2016 in Bangkok, Thailand and is available at http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3012698. The datasets are available at http://geoinfo.bgpmon.io.

From the abstract:

There are currently no requirements (technical or otherwise) that routing paths must be contained within national boundaries. Indeed, some paths experience international detours, i.e., originate in one country, cross international boundaries and return to the same country. In most cases these are sensible traffic engineering or peering decisions at ISPs that serve multiple countries. In some cases such detours may be suspicious. Characterizing international detours is useful to a number of players: (a) network engineers trying to diagnose persistent problems, (b) policy makers aiming at adhering to certain national communication policies, (c) entrepreneurs looking for opportunities to deploy new networks, or (d) privacy-conscious states trying to minimize the amount of internal communication traversing different jurisdictions.

In this paper we characterize international detours in the Internet during the month of January 2016. To detect detours we sample BGP RIBs every 8 hours from 461 RouteViews and RIPE RIS peers spanning 30 countries. We use geolocation of ASes which geolocates each BGP prefix announced by each AS, mapping its presence at IXPs and geolocation infrastructure IPs. Finally, we analyze each global BGP RIB entry looking for detours. Our analysis shows more than 5K unique BGP prefixes experienced a detour. 132 prefixes experienced more than 50% of the detours. We observe about 544K detours. Detours either last for a few days or persist the entire month. Out of all the detours, more than 90% were transient detours that lasted for 72 hours or less. We also show different countries experience different characteristics of detours.

This work won the Best Paper Award at AINTEC 2016. APNIC blog post on this paper can be found here.

The work in this paper is by Anant Shah, Christos Papadopoulos (Colorado State University) and Romain Fontugne (Internet Initiative Japan).

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Papers Publications

new conference paper “Anycast Latency: How Many Sites Are Enough?” in PAM 2017

The paper “Anycast Latency: How Many Sites Are Enough?” will appear at PAM 2017, the Conference on Passive and Active Measurement in March 2017 in Sydney, Australia (available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Schmidt17a.pdf)

Update 2017-03-31:  This paper was awarded Best Paper at PAM 2017.

Median RTT (with quartiles as error bars) for countries with at least 5 vantage points for L-Root in 2015. Even more than 100 anycast sites, L still has relatively high latency in some countries in Africa and Asia.

 

 

 

From the abstract:

Anycast is widely used today to provide important services such as DNS and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). An anycast service uses multiple sites to provide high availability, capacity and redundancy. BGP routing associates users to sites, defining the catchment that each site serves. Although prior work has studied how users associate with anycast services informally, in this paper we examine the key question how many anycast sites are needed to provide good latency, and the worst case latencies that specific deployments see. To answer this question, we first define the optimal performance that is possible, then explore how routing, specific anycast policies, and site location affect performance. We develop a new method capable of determining optimal performance and use it to study four real-world anycast services operated by different organizations: C-, F-, K-, and L-Root, each part of the Root DNS service. We measure their performance from more than 7,900 vantage points (VPs) worldwide using RIPE Atlas. (Given the VPs uneven geographic distribution, we evaluate and control for potential bias.) Our key results show that a few sites can provide performance nearly as good as many, and that geographic location and good connectivity have a far stronger effect on latency than having many sites. We show how often users see the closest anycast site, and how strongly routing policy affects site selection.

This paper is joint work of  Ricardo de Oliveira Schmidt, John Heidemann (USC/ISI), and Jan Harm Kuipers (U. Twente).  Datasets in this paper are derived from RIPE Atlas and are available at http://traces.simpleweb.org/ and at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/anycast/.

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Papers Publications

new conference paper “Anycast vs. DDoS: Evaluating the November 2015 Root DNS Event” in IMC 2016

The paper “Anycast vs. DDoS: Evaluating the November 2015 Root DNS Event” will appear at ACM Internet Measurement Conference in November 2016 in Santa Monica, California, USA. (available at http://www.isi.edu/~weilan/PAPER/IMC2016camera.pdf)

From the abstract:

RIPE Atlas VPs going to different anycast sites when under stress. Colors indicate different sites, with black showing unsuccessful queries. [Moura16b, figure 11b]

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks continue to be a major threat in the Internet today. DDoS attacks overwhelm target services with requests or other traffic, causing requests from legitimate users to be shut out. A common defense against DDoS is to replicate the service in multiple physical locations or sites. If all sites announce a common IP address, BGP will associate users around the Internet with a nearby site,defining the catchment of that site. Anycast addresses DDoS both by increasing capacity to the aggregate of many sites, and allowing each catchment to contain attack traffic leaving other sites unaffected. IP anycast is widely used for commercial CDNs and essential infrastructure such as DNS, but there is little evaluation of anycast under stress. This paper provides the first evaluation of several anycast services under stress with public data. Our subject is the Internet’s Root Domain Name Service, made up of 13 independently designed services (“letters”, 11 with IP anycast) running at more than 500 sites. Many of these services were stressed by sustained traffic at 100 times normal load on Nov.30 and Dec.1, 2015. We use public data for most of our analysis to examine how different services respond to the these events. We see how different anycast deployments respond to stress, and identify two policies: sites may absorb attack traffic, containing the damage but reducing service to some users, or they may withdraw routes to shift both good and bad traffic to other sites. We study how these deployments policies result in different levels of service to different users. We also show evidence of collateral damage on other services located near the attacks.

This IMC paper is joint work of  Giovane C. M. Moura, Moritz Müller, Cristian Hesselman (SIDN Labs), Ricardo de O. Schmidt, Wouter B. de Vries (U. Twente), John Heidemann, Lan Wei (USC/ISI). Datasets in this paper are derived from RIPE Atlas and are available at http://traces.simpleweb.org/ and at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/anycast/.

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Publications Technical Report

new technical report “Do You See Me Now? Sparsity in Passive Observations of Address Liveness (extended)”

We have released a new technical report “Do You See Me Now? Sparsity in Passive Observations of Address Liveness (extended)”, ISI-TR-2016-710, available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Mirkovic16a.pdf

How many USC addresses are visible from virtual remote monitors, based on the monitor's overall visibility.
How many USC addresses are visible from virtual remote monitors, based on the monitor’s overall visibility.

From the abstract:

Full allocation of IPv4 addresses has prompted interest in measuring address liveness, first with active probing, and recently with the addition of passive observation. While prior work has shown dramatic increases in coverage, this paper explores what factors affect contributions of passive observers to visibility. While all passive monitors are sparse, seeing only a part of the Internet, we seek to understand how different types of sparsity impact observation quality: the interests of external hosts and the hosts within the observed network, the temporal limitations on the observation duration, and coverage challenges to observe all traffic for a given target or a given vantage point. We study sparsity with inverted analysis, a new approach where we use passive monitors at four sites to infer what monitors would see at all sites exchanging traffic with those four. We show that visibility provided by monitors is heavy-tailed—interest sparsity means popular monitors see a great deal, while 99% see very little. We find that traffic is bipartite, with visibility much stronger between client-networks and server-networks than within each group. Finally, we find that popular monitors are robust to temporal and coverage sparsity, but they greatly reduce power of monitors that start with low visibility.

This technical report is joint work of  Jelena Mirkovic, Genevieve Bartlett, John Heidemann, Hao Shi, and Xiyue Deng, all of USC/ISI.

Categories
Publications Technical Report

new technical report “Anycast vs. DDoS: Evaluating the November 2015 Root DNS Event”

We have released a new technical report “Anycast vs. DDoS: Evaluating the November 2015 Root DNS Event”, ISI-TR-2016-709, available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Moura16a.pdf

From the abstract:

[Moura16a] Figure 3
[Moura16a] Figure 3: reachability at several root letters (anycast instances) during two events with very heavy traffic.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks continue to be a major threat in the Internet today. DDoS attacks overwhelm target services with requests or other traffic, causing requests from legitimate users to be shut out. A common defense against DDoS is to replicate the service in multiple physical locations or sites. If all sites announce a common IP address, BGP will associate users around the Internet with a nearby site,defining the catchment of that site. Anycast addresses DDoS both by increasing capacity to the aggregate of many sites, and allowing each catchment to contain attack traffic leaving other sites unaffected. IP anycast is widely used for commercial CDNs and essential infrastructure such as DNS, but there is little evaluation of anycast under stress. This paper provides the first evaluation of several anycast services under stress with public data. Our subject is the Internet’s Root Domain Name Service, made up of 13 independently designed services (“letters”, 11 with IP anycast) running at more than 500 sites. Many of these services were stressed by sustained traffic at 100 times normal load on Nov.30 and Dec.1, 2015. We use public data for most of our analysis to examine how different services respond to the these events. We see how different anycast deployments respond to stress, and identify two policies: sites may absorb attack traffic, containing the damage but reducing service to some users, or they may withdraw routes to shift both good and bad traffic to other sites. We study how these deployments policies result in different levels of service to different users. We also show evidence of collateral damage on other services located near the attacks.

This technical report is joint work of  Giovane C. M. Moura, Moritz Müller, Cristian Hesselman(SIDN Labs), Ricardo de O. Schmidt, Wouter B. de Vries (U. Twente), John Heidemann, Lan Wei (USC/ISI). Datasets in this paper are derived from RIPE Atlas and are available at http://traces.simpleweb.org/ and at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/.

Categories
Publications Technical Report

new technical report “Anycast Latency: How Many Sites Are Enough?”

We have released a new technical report “Anycast Latency: How Many Sites Are Enough?”, ISI-TR-2016-708, available at http://www.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Schmidt16a.pdf.

[Schmidt16a] figure 4: distribution of measured latency (solid lines) to optimal possible latency (dashed lines) for 4 Root DNS anycast deployments.
[Schmidt16a] figure 4: distribution of measured latency (solid lines) to optimal possible latency (dashed lines) for 4 Root DNS anycast deployments.
From the abstract:

Anycast is widely used today to provide important services including naming and content, with DNS and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). An anycast service uses multiple sites to provide high availability, capacity and redundancy, with BGP routing associating users to nearby anycast sites. Routing defines the catchment of the users that each site serves. Although prior work has studied how users associate with anycast services informally, in this paper we examine the key question how many anycast sites are needed to provide good latency, and the worst case latencies that specific deployments see. To answer this question, we must first define the optimal performance that is possible, then explore how routing, specific anycast policies, and site location affect performance. We develop a new method capable of determining optimal performance and use it to study four real-world anycast services operated by different organizations: C-, F-, K-, and L-Root, each part of the Root DNS service. We measure their performance from more than worldwide vantage points (VPs) in RIPE Atlas. (Given the VPs uneven geographic distribution, we evaluate and control for potential bias.) Key results of our study are to show that a few sites can provide performance nearly as good as many, and that geographic location and good connectivity have a far stronger effect on latency than having many nodes. We show how often users see the closest anycast site, and how strongly routing policy affects site selection.

This technical report is joint work of Ricardo de O. Schmidt and Jan Harm Kuipers (U. Twente) and John Heidemann (USC/ISI).  Datasets in this paper are derived from RIPE Atlas and are available at http://traces.simpleweb.org/.

 

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Papers Publications

new workshop paper “Assessing Co-Locality of IP Blocks” in GI 2016

The paper “Assessing Co-Locality of IP Blocks” appeared in the 19th IEEE  Global Internet Symposium on April 11, 2016 in San Francisco, CA, USA and is available at (http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~manafgh/publications/Assessing-Co-Locality-of-IP-Block-GI2016.pdf). The datasets are available at (https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/geolocation/).

From the abstract:

isi_all_blocks_clustersCountMany IP Geolocation services and applications assume that all IP addresses within the same /24 IPv4 prefix (a /24 block) reside in close physical proximity. For blocks that contain addresses in very different locations (such as blocks identifying network backbones), this assumption can result in a large geolocation error. In this paper we evaluate the co-location assumption. We first develop and validate a hierarchical clustering method to find clusters of IP addresses with similar observed delay measurements within /24 blocks. We validate our methodology against two ground-truth datasets, confirming that 93% of the identified multi-cluster blocks are true positives with multiple physical locations and an upper bound for false positives of only about 5.4%. We then apply our methodology to a large dataset of 1.41M /24 blocks extracted from a delay-measurement study of the entire responsive IPv4 address space. We find that about 247K (17%) out of 1.41M blocks are not co-located, thus quantifying the error in the /24 block co-location assumption.

The work in this paper is by Manaf Gharaibeh, Han Zhang, Christos Papadopoulos (Colorado State University) and John Heidemann (USC/ISI).

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Papers Publications

new workshop paper “BotDigger: Detecting DGA Bots in a Single Network” in TMA 2016

The paper “BotDigger: Detecting DGA Bots in a Single Network” has appeared at the TMA Workshop on April 8, 2016 in Louvain La Neuve, Belgium (available at http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~hanzhang/papers/BotDigger-TMA16.pdf).

The code of BotDigger is available on GitHub at: https://github.com/hanzhang0116/BotDigger

From the abstract:

To improve the resiliency of communication between bots and C&C servers, bot masters began utilizing Domain Generation Algorithms (DGA) in recent years. Many systems have been introduced to detect DGA-based botnets. However, they suffer from several limitations, such as requiring DNS traffic collected across many networks, the presence of multiple bots from the same botnet, and so forth. These limitations mBotDiggerOverviewake it very hard to detect individual bots when using traffic collected from a single network. In this paper, we introduce BotDigger, a system that detects DGA-based bots using DNS traffic without a priori knowledge of the domain generation algorithm. BotDigger utilizes a chain of evidence, including quantity, temporal and linguistic evidence to detect an individual bot by only monitoring traffic at the DNS servers of a single network. We evaluate BotDigger’s performance using traces from two DGA-based botnets: Kraken and Conflicker. Our results show that BotDigger detects all the Kraken bots and 99.8% of Conficker bots. A one-week DNS trace captured from our university and three traces collected from our research lab are used to evaluate false positives. The results show that the false positive rates are 0.05% and 0.39% for these two groups of background traces, respectively.

The work in this paper is by Han Zhang, Manaf Gharaibeh, Spiros Thanasoulas, and Christos Papadopoulos (Colorado State University).

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Papers Publications

new workshop paper “AuntieTuna: Personalized Content-based Phishing Detection” in USEC 2016

The paper “AuntieTuna: Personalized Content-based Phishing Detection” will appear at the NDSS Usable Security Workshop on February 21, 2016 in San Diego, CA, USA (available at https://www.isi.edu/~calvin/papers/Ardi16a.pdf).

From the abstract:

Implementation diagram of the AuntieTuna anti-phishing plugin.Phishing sites masquerade as copies of legitimate sites (“targets”) to fool people into sharing sensitive information that can then be used for fraud. Current phishing defenses can be ineffective, with training ignored, blacklists of discovered, bad sites too slow to pick up new threats, and whitelists of known-good sites too limiting. We have developed a new technique that automatically builds personalized lists of target sites (candidates that may be copied by phish) and then tests sites as a user browses them. Our approach uses cryptographic hashing of each page’s rendered Document Object Model (DOM), providing a zero false positive rate and identifying more than half of detectable phish in a controlled study. Since each user develops a customized list of target sites, our approach presents a diverse defense against phishers. We have prototyped our approach as a Chrome browser plugin called AuntieTuna, emphasizing usability through automated and simple manual addition of target sites and clean reports of potential phish that include context about the targeted site. AuntieTuna does not slow web browsing time and presents alerts on phishing pages before users can divulge information. Our plugin is open-source and has been in use by a few users for months.

The work in this paper is by Calvin Ardi (USC/ISI) and John Heidemann (USC/ISI).

Categories
Publications Technical Report

new technical report “BotDigger: Detecting DGA Bots in a Single Network”

We have released a new technical report “BotDigger: Detecting DGA Bots in a Single Network”, CS-16-101, available at http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~hanzhang/papers/BotDigger-techReport.pdf

The code of BotDigger is available on GitHub at: https://github.com/hanzhang0116/BotDigger

From the abstract:

To improve the resiliency of communication between bots and C&C servers, bot masters began utilizing Domain Generation Algorithms (DGA) in recent years. Many systems have been introduced to detect DGA-based botnets. However, they suffer from several limitations, such as requiring DNS traffic collected across many networks, the presence of multiple bots from the same botnet, and so forth. BotDiggerOverviewThese limitations make it very hard to detect individual bots when using traffic collected from a single network. In this paper, we introduce BotDigger, a system that detects DGA-based bots using DNS traffic without a priori knowledge of the domain generation algorithm. BotDigger utilizes a chain of evidence, including quantity, temporal and linguistic evidence
to detect an individual bot by only monitoring traffic at the DNS servers of a single network. We evaluate BotDigger’s performance using traces from two DGA-based botnets: Kraken and Conflicker. Our results show that BotDigger detects all the Kraken bots and 99.8% of Conficker bots. A one-week DNS trace captured from our university and three traces collected from our research lab are used to evaluate false positives. The results show that the false positive rates are 0.05% and 0.39% for these two groups of background traces, respectively.

This work is by Han Zhang, Manaf Gharaibeh, Spiros Thanasoulas and Christos Papadopoulos (Colorado State University).