Month: March 2014

Categories
Presentations

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.

Categories
Papers Publications

new conference paper “The Need for End-to-End Evaluation of Cloud Availability” in PAM 2014

The paper “The Need for End-to-End Evaluation of Cloud Availability” was published by PAM 2014 in Marina del Rey, CA (available at http://www.isi.edu/~zihu/paper/cloud_availability.pdf).

From the abstract:cloud_availability_blog

People’s computing lives are moving into the cloud, making understanding cloud availability increasingly critical. Prior studies of Internet outages have used ICMP-based pings and traceroutes. While these studies can detect network availability, we show that they can be inaccurate at estimating cloud availability. Without care, ICMP probes can underestimate availability because ICMP is not as robust as application-level measurements such as HTTP. They can overestimate availability if they measure reachability of the cloud’s edge, missing failures in the cloud’s back-end. We develop methodologies sensitive to five “nines” of reliability, and then we compare ICMP and end-to-end measurements for both cloud VM and storage services. We show case studies where one fails and the other succeeds, and our results highlight the importance of application-level retries to reach high precision. When possible, we recommend end-to-end measurement with application-level protocols to evaluate the availability of cloud services.

Citation: Zi Hu, Liang Zhu, Calvin Ardi, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Harsha Madhyastha, John Heidemann, Minlan Yu. The Need for End-to-End Evaluation of Cloud Availability. Passive and Active Measurements Conference (PAM). Los Angeles, CA, USA, March 2014.

Categories
Presentations

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.