Month: September 2017

Categories
In-the-news Internet Outages

Evaluation of Hurricane Harvey’s Effects on the Internet’s Edge

On August 25, 2017 Hurricane Harvey made landfall in south Texas, causing widespread property damage, displacing more than 30,000 people, and costing more than 45 lives (as of 2017-09-01).

We sympathize with those were hurt by this disaster, and hope for swift recovery for the region.

We recently examined the effects of Hurricane Harvey on the area using Trinocular, our internet outage detection system.  Two key results:

Trinocular report on outages in Texas after Hurricane Harvey (on 2017-08-28t03:32Z)

We see that landfall was followed by widespread Internet outages in the Corpus Christi area, with 40% or more home networks dropping off the Internet.

We see that over the following days, network outages grew in the Houston area, with many networks dropping off the Internet. However, the fraction of networks lost in Houston was much smaller than in the Corpus Christi area.

More details are on our Hurricane Harvey web page.  We will update that page as we get more data in.

The dataset including Hurricane Harvey will be internet_outage_adaptive_a29all-20170702 and will be released in October 2017. Until the full data is released, we have a preliminary dataset through August 2017 available on request.

Categories
Publications Technical Report

new technical report “LDplayer: DNS Experimentation at Scale (abstract with poster)”

We released a new technical report “LDplayer: DNS Experimentation at Scale (abstract with poster)”, ISI-TR-721, available at https://www.isi.edu/publications/trpublic/pdfs/ISI-TR-721.pdf.

The poster abstract and poster (included as part of the technical report) appeared at the poster session at the SIGCOMM 2017 in August 2017 in Los Angeles, CA, USA.

From the abstract:

In the last 20 years the core of the Domain Name System (DNS) has improved in security and privacy, and DNS use broadened from name-to-address mapping to a critical roles in service discovery and anti-spam. However, protocol evolution and expansion of use has been slow because advances must consider a huge and diverse installed base. We suggest that experimentation at scale can fill this gap. To meet the need for experimentation at scale, this paper presents LDplayer, a configurable, general-purpose DNS testbed. LDplayer enables DNS experiments to scale in several dimensions: many zones, multiple levels of DNS hierarchy, high query rates, and diverse query sources. To meet these requirements while providing high fidelity experiments, LDplayer includes a distributed DNS query replay system and methods to rebuild the relevant DNS hierarchy from traces. We show that a single DNS server can correctly emulate multiple independent levels of the DNS hierarchy while providing correct responses as if they were independent. We show the importance of our system to evaluate pressing DNS design questions, using it to evaluate changes in DNSSEC key size.