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.
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?”.
Emulating the DNS hierarchy both efficiently and correctly.
The DNS ecosystem today is revisiting basic design questions: should it encourage TCP? TLS? DTLS? Something completely new like QUIC or HTTP? While modeling and analysis help answer some of these questions, experimental evaluation is necessary for validation, and in some cases the only way to get accurate estimates of software memory use and performance. This talk will discuss our recent work in supporting experimental evaluation of DNS with components that support trace replay and evaluation. Trace replay is supported by a DNS data archive to prime replay with real data, and a query mutation system to support what-if evaluation using variations of that data.
The trace replay system is the work with Liang Zhu; this work is part of a larger system to support DNS experimentation, joint work with Wes Hardaker.
Unmeasurable blocks over time, a challenge in long-haul outage measurement, from [Alwabel15a]We have been collecting data about outages in the Internet since Oct. 2014. Our outage detection system, Trinocular, uses active probing from four sites to study about 4 million /24 IPv4 address blocks. Long-duration measurements bring challenges that don’t occur in short observations. Most importantly, our target (“the Internet”) changes as we measure it, as new blocks come on-line, old blocks are reused in different ways, and ISPs observe and sometimes block our traffic. Our measurement platform also sees occasional hardware failures. Visualization can assist detection of these problems, allowing human perception to detect changes in data collection that have not previously been anticipated. This talk will discuss the challenges of long-term outage measurement and describe our new algorithm that scales to support clustering of 4M blocks and 3 months of observations for visualization.
Our visualization is joint work with Yuri Pradkin, and analysis of our long-term outages includes work with Abdulla Alwabel.
John Heidemann gave the talk “DNS Privacy, Service Management, and Research: Friends or Foes” at the NDSS DNS Privacy Workshop in San Diego, California, USA on Feburary 26, 2017. Slides are available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann17a.pdf.
The talk does not have a formal abstract, but to summarize:
A slide from the [Heidemann17a] talk, looking at what different DNS stakeholders may want.
This invited talk is part of a panel on the tension between DNS privacy and service management. In the talk I expand on that topic and discuss
the tension between DNS privacy, service management, and research.
I give suggestions about how service management and research can adapt to proceed while still providing basic privacy.
In each anycast-based DNS root service, there are about 1% VPs see a route flip happens every one or two observation during a week with an observation interval as 4 min.
Anycast-based services today are widely used commercially, with several major providers serving thousands of important websites. However, to our knowledge, there has been only limited study of how often anycast fails because routing changes interrupt connections between users and their current anycast site. While the commercial success of anycast CDNs means anycast usually work well, do some users end up shut out of anycast? In this paper we examine data from more than 9000 geographically distributed vantage points (VPs) to 11 anycast services to evaluate this question. Our contribution is the analysis of this data to provide the first quantification of this problem, and to explore where and why it occurs. We see that about 1% of VPs are anycast unstable, reaching a different anycast site frequently sometimes every query. Flips back and forth between two sites in 10 seconds are observed in selected experiments for given service and VPs.
Moreover, we show that anycast instability is persistent for some VPs—a few VPs never see a stable connections to certain anycast services during a week or even longer. The vast majority of VPs only saw unstable routing towards one or two services instead of instability with all services, suggesting the cause of the instability lies somewhere in the path to the anycast sites. Finally, we point out that for highly-unstable VPs, their probability to hit a given site is constant, which means the flipping are happening at a fine granularity —per packet level, suggesting load balancing might be the cause to anycast routing flipping. Our findings confirm the common wisdom that anycast almost always works well, but provide evidence that a small number of locations in the Internet where specific anycast services are never stable.
This technical report is joint work of Lan Wei, John Heidemann, from USC/ISI.
This tool is designed to capture packets from multiple sources and write its output to a single file. Its build requires a local install of libtrace library (version 4.0 or older) and supports all sources supported by the library, such as pcap based interfaces, linux-specific ring interfaces, pcap and erf outputs and many more! See them all listed when you run mtracecap with -H option. DAG device capture is optional, depending on local DAG libraries being present.
An important feature of this tool is being able to roll output into multiple files either based on either maximum file size (e.g. “-S 100” option will make it write output in 100MB chunks), or system time (e.g. “-G 180” option will rotate output every 180 seconds).
Finally, the tool can use external commands to work on the input before writing it to a file using a pipe (see –pipeout option). This can be useful if you want to compute some statistics on the fly or compress output using an external compressor. Using this option will eliminate extra disk read-write operations if all you want to do is to compress the output.
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/.
Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks are continuing threat to the Internet. Meeting this threat requires new approaches that will emerge from new research, but new research requires the support of dataset and experimental methods. This talk describes four different aspects of research on DDoS, privacy and security, and the datasets that have generated to support that research. Areas we consider are detecting low rate DDoS attacks, understanding the effects of DDoS on DNS infrastructure, evolving the DNS protocol to prevent DDoS and improve privacy, and ideas about experimental testbeds to evaluate new ideas in DDoS defense for DNS. Datasets described in this talk are available at no cost from the author and through the IMPACT Program.
This talk is based on the work with many prior collaborators: Terry Benzel, Wes Hardaker, Christian Hessleman, Zi Hu, Allison Mainkin, Urbashi Mitra, Giovane Moura, Moritz Müller, Ricardo de O. Schmidt, Nikita Somaiya, Gautam Thatte, Wouter de Vries, Lan Wei, Duane Wessels, Liang Zhu.
![A slide from the [Heidemann17a] talk, looking at what different DNS stakeholders may want.](https://ant.isi.edu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Heidemann17a_icon.png){kind=icon}
From the abstract:
