Categories
Announcements Projects

new project LACANIC

We are happy to announce a new project, LACANIC, the Los Angeles/Colorado Application and Network Information Community.

The LACANIC project’s goal is to develop datasets to improve Internet security and readability. We distribute these datasets through the DHS IMPACT program.

As part of this work we:

  • provide regular data collection to collect long-term, longitudinal data
  • curate datasets for special events
  • build websites and portals to help make data accessible to casual users
  • develop new measurement approaches

We provide several types of datasets:

  • anonymized packet headers and network flow data, often to document events like distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and regular traffic
  • Internet censuses and surveys for IPv4 to document address usage
  • Internet hitlists and histories, derived from IPv4 censuses, to support other topology studies
  • application data, like DNS and Internet-of-Things mapping, to document regular traffic and DDoS events
  • and we are developing other datasets

LACANIC allows us to continue some of the data collection we were doing as part of the LACREND project, as well as develop new methods and ways of sharing the data.

LACANIC is a joint effort of the ANT Lab involving USC/ISI (PI: John Heidemann) and Colorado State University (PI: Christos Papadopoulos).

We thank DHS’s Cyber Security Division for their continued support!

 

Categories
Announcements DNS Internet

B-Root begins anycast

We are happy to report that B-Root has begun anycasting on 2017-05-02 from two sites (Miami and Los Angeles).  The ANT project has helped support this effort with anycast measurements.  See the official announcement on the B-Root webpage, and watch here for more details about the measurement approaches.

Categories
Announcements Collaborations Papers

best paper award at PAM 2017

The PAM 2017 best paper award for “Anycast Latency: How Many Sites Are Enough?”

Congratulations to Ricardo de Oliveira Schmidt (U. Twente), John Heidemann (USC/ISI), and Jan Harm Kuipers (U. Twente) for the award of  best paper at the Conference on Passive and Active Measurement (PAM) 2017 to their paper “Anycast Latency: How Many Sites Are Enough?”.

See our prior blog post for more information about the paper and its data, and the U. Twente blog post about the paper and the SIDN Labs blog post about the paper.

Categories
Announcements Collaborations Papers

best paper award at AINTEC 2016

Best paper award to Shah, Fontugne, and Papadopoulos at AINTEC 2016

Congratulations to Anant Shah, Christos Papadopoulos (Colorado State University) and Romain Fontugne (Internet Initiative Japan) for the award of  best paper at AINTEC 2016 to their paper “Towards Characterizing International Routing Detours”.

See our prior blog post for more information about the paper and its data, and the APNIC blog post about this paper.

Categories
Announcements Data Internet

ANT IPv4 census appears in Library of Congress Blog on Innovative Mapping

John Hessler, a member of the US Library of Congress’ Geography and Map Division wrote a nice blog post about our IPv4 Internet maps: “Computing Space V: Mapping the Web or Pinging your Way to Infinity“.  Check out his take on our IPv4 data!

You too can browse the IPv4 Internet at our website.  Or for detailed analysis, get the data from IMPACT or us.

Thanks to the DHS IMPACT program for supporting collection of this data.

Categories
Announcements Projects

new workshop program for DINR-2016 (DNS and Internet Naming Research Directions)

We’re happy to be hosting DINR-2016 (DNS and Internet Naming Research Directions).

The workshop program is now online; folks interested in joining us should contact the chairs.

We’re looking forward to an exciting day of many short talks!

Categories
Announcements In-the-news

new RFC “Specification for DNS over Transport Layer Security (TLS)”

The Internet RFC-7858, “Specification for DNS over Transport Layer Security (TLS)”, was just released by the ITEF as a Standards Track document.

From the abstract:

This document describes the use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) to provide privacy for DNS. Encryption provided by TLS eliminates opportunities for eavesdropping and on-path tampering with DNS queries in the network, such as discussed in RFC 7626. In addition, this document specifies two usage profiles for DNS over TLS and provides advice on performance considerations to minimize overhead from using TCP and TLS with DNS.

This document focuses on securing stub-to-recursive traffic, as per
the charter of the DPRIVE Working Group. It does not prevent future applications of the protocol to recursive-to-authoritative traffic.

This RFC is joint work of Zhi Hu, Liang Zhu, John Heidemann, Allison Mankin, Duane Wessels, and Paul Hoffman, of USC/ISI, Verisign, ICANN, and independent (at different times).  This RFC is one result of our prior paper “Connection-Oriented DNS to Improve Privacy and Security”, but also represents the input of the DPRIVE IETF working group (Warren Kumari and Tim Wicinski, chairs), where it is one of a set of RFCs designed to improve DNS privacy.

On to deployments!

Categories
Announcements Students

student recruiting for Fall 2016

ANT will be looking for one (or perhaps two) strong PhD students interested in our areas of research to start at USC in Fall 2016. If you’re interested in working with our research group, please apply to our PhD program (the deadline is December 15, 2015 and the CS department has application information).

For MS students at USC, we sometimes to directed research projects, usually as part of CSci551 or CSci651–if you’re interested, please read our webpage with specific MS-student advice.

For undergraduates interested in research, please see our webpage with specific undgraduate-student advice.

Categories
Announcements

website refresh

The new ANT web home page
The new ANT web home page

After more than ten years of hand-coded, mostly-themed HTML, we’ve finally revamped our website with Jekyll and moved it to our own server at https://ant.isi.edu/.  We love producing papers, software, and datasets, and we now finally automate the tedious task cross-referencing these across our pages.  It also brings more consistent theming, and our server brings HTTPS for better privacy.

Thanks to Calvin Ardi for kicking this off, and to almost everyone in the group for pitching in to go over old pages.

Categories
Announcements Collaborations Data Internet Outages

welcoming Greece to the ANT Internet Census

We’re happy to welcome Greece to our browsable Internet map at http://www.isi.edu/ant/address/browse/ !  Of course Greece has always been in our Internet censuses, but George Xylomenos and George Polyzos of the Athens University of Economics and Business (their lab) helped set up a new observation site.  Greece now provides a new vantage point for Internet censuses.

The differences in the census are small, as one would hope, since it’s a global Internet.  However, when we look at latency (the time it takes for an IP address to reply to our requests), Greece gives us a European view.

Compare the lower-left corner of the Internet, since that is European IPv4 address space:

it61g RTTs
Round-trip times from our Greek vantage point (in AUEB.gr) to the world. Observe that European IP addresses in the lower left corner are nearby (light colored).
it61w RTTs
Round-trip times from our Los Angeles-based vantage point (at isi.edu) to the world. Observe that European IP addresses in the lower left corner are distant (darker gray).

In addition to big thanks to George Xylomenos and George Polyzos of AUEB (σας ευχαριστώ!) and AUEB for institutional funding for this work.  We also thank Christos Papadopoulos (Colorado State) for helping with many details, and Colin Perkins (U. Glasgow) for discussions about potential European hosts.

Data from our Greece census is available to researchers at no cost on the same terms as our existing census data.  See our datasets page for details. Greek data starts with it61 as of 2014-08-29.