Mozilla announced the creation of a “use-application-dns.net”
“Canary Domain” that could be configured within ISPs to disable
Firefox’s default use of DNS over HTTPS. On 2019/09/21 Wes Hardaker created a
RIPE Atlas measurement to study resolvers within ISPs that had been
configured to return an NXDOMAIN response. This measurement is
configured to have 1000 Atlas probes query for the
use-application-dns.net name once a day.
The full description of methodology is on Wes’ ISI site, which should receive regular updates to the graph.
On November 14 we had a group lunch near ISI to celebrate the completion of Joao Ceron’s visit from the University of Twente as a visiting scholar, to welcome Asma Enayet to the group as a new PhD student, and to welcome Hang Guo’s son into the world. (Hang was understandably not able to make the lunch.) Happy Thanksgiving to all!
A group lunch in honor of Asma (left) and Joao (6th left).
[Bogutz19a, figure 1]: Our sideboard showing important outages on 2019-03-08, including this outage in Venezuela.
Today, outage detection systems can track outages across the whole IPv4 Internet—millions of networks. However, it becomes difficult to find meaningful, interesting events in this huge dataset, since three months of data can easily include 660M observations and thousands of outage events. We propose an outage reporting system that sifts through this data to find the most interesting events. We explore multiple metrics to evaluate interesting”, reflecting the size and severity of outages. We show that defining interest as the product of size by severity works well, avoiding degenerate cases like complete outages affecting a few people, and apparently large outages that affect only a small fraction of people in an area. We have integrated outage reporting into our existing public website (https://outage.ant.isi.edu) with the goal of making near-real-time outage information accessible to the general public. Such data can help answer questions like “what are the most significant outages today?”, did Florida have major problems in an ongoing hurricane?”, and “are there power outages in Venezuela?”.
The data from this paper is available publicly and in our website. The technical report ISI-TR-735 includes some additional data.
We have released a new technical report “Improving the Optics of the Active Outage Detection (extended)”, by Guillermo Baltra and John Heidemann, as ISI-TR-733.
From the abstract:
A sample block showing changes in block usage (c), and outage detection results of Trinocular (b) and improved with the Full Block Scanning Algorithm (a).
There is a growing interest in carefully observing the reliability of the Internet’s edge. Outage information can inform our understanding of Internet reliability and planning, and it can help guide operations. Outage detection algorithms using active probing from third parties have been shown to be accurate for most of the Internet, but inaccurate for blocks that are sparsely occupied. Our contributions include a definition of outages, which we use to determine how many independent observers are required to determine global outages. We propose a new Full Block Scanning (FBS) algorithm that gathers more information for sparse blocks to reduce false outage reports. We also propose ISP Availability Sensing (IAS) to detect maintenance activity using only external information. We study a year of outage data and show that FBS has a True Positive Rate of 86%, and show that IAS detects maintenance events in a large U.S. ISP.
All data from this paper will be publicly available.
Wes Hardaker gave two presentations at DNS-OARC on November 1st, 2019. The first was a presentation about the previously announced “Cache me if you can” paper, which is on youtube, and the slides are available as well. The second talk presented Haoyu Jiang’s work during the summer of 2018 on analyzing DNS B-Root traffic during the 2018 DITL data for levels of traffic sent by the Chrome web browser, levels of traffic associated with different languages, and levels of traffic sent by different label lengths. It is available on youtube with the slides here.
