Tag: ant

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Announcements Projects

new project “Measuring the Internet during Novel Coronavirus to Evaluate Quarantine” (MINCEQ)

We are happy to announce a new project “Measuring the Internet during Novel Coronavirus to Evaluate Quarantine” (MINCEQ).

Measuring the Internet during Novel Coronavirus to Evaluate Quarantine (RAPID-MINCEQ) is a project to measure changes in Internet use during the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020. As the world grapples with COVID-19, work-from-home and study-from-home are widely employed. Implementation of these policies varies across the U.S. and globally due to local circumstances. A common consequence is a huge shift in Internet use, with schools and workplaces emptying and home Internet use increasing. The goal of this project is to observe this shift, globally, through changes in Internet address usage, allowing observation of early reactions to COVID and, one hopes, a future shift back.

This project plans to develop two complementary methods of assessing Internet use by measuring address activity and how it changes relative to historical trends. The project will directly measure Internet address use globally based on continuous, ongoing measurements of more than 4 million IPv4 networks. The project will also directly measure Internet address use in network traffic at a regional Internet exchange point where multiple Internet providers interconnect. The first approach provides a global picture, while the second provides a more detailed but regional picture; together they will help evaluate measurement accuracy.

The project website is at https://ant.isi.edu/minceq/index.html. The PI is John Heidemann. This work is supported by NSF as a RAPID award in response to COVID-19, award NSF-2028279.

Categories
Social

group lunch in honor of a departure and two arrivals

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).
Categories
Publications Technical Report

new technical report “Improving the Optics of Active Outage Detection (extended)”

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.

Categories
Presentations

Talks at DNS-OARC 61

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.

Categories
Announcements

reblogging: the diurnal Internet and DNS backscatter

We are happy to share that two of our older topics have appeared more recently in other venues.

Our animations of the diurnal Internet, originally seen in our 2014 ACM IMC paper and our blog posts, was noticed by Gerald Smith who used it to start a discussion with seventh-grade classes in Mahe, India and (I think) Indiana, USA as part of his Fullbright work. It’s great to see research work that useful to middle-schoolers!

Kensuke Fukuda recently posted about our work on identifying IPv6 scanning with DNS backscatter at the APNIC blog. This work was originally published at the 2018 ACM IMC and posted in our blog. It’s great to see that work get out to a new audience.

Categories
Papers Publications

new paper “Precise Detection of Content Reuse in the Web” to appear in ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review

We have published a new paper “Precise Detection of Content Reuse in the Web” by Calvin Ardi and John Heidemann, in the ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (Volume 49 Issue 2, April 2019) newsletter.

From the abstract:

With vast amount of content online, it is not surprising that unscrupulous entities “borrow” from the web to provide content for advertisements, link farms, and spam. Our insight is that cryptographic hashing and fingerprinting can efficiently identify content reuse for web-size corpora. We develop two related algorithms, one to automatically discover previously unknown duplicate content in the web, and the second to precisely detect copies of discovered or manually identified content. We show that bad neighborhoods, clusters of pages where copied content is frequent, help identify copying in the web. We verify our algorithm and its choices with controlled experiments over three web datasets: Common Crawl (2009/10), GeoCities (1990s–2000s), and a phishing corpus (2014). We show that our use of cryptographic hashing is much more precise than alternatives such as locality-sensitive hashing, avoiding the thousands of false-positives that would otherwise occur. We apply our approach in three systems: discovering and detecting duplicated content in the web, searching explicitly for copies of Wikipedia in the web, and detecting phishing sites in a web browser. We show that general copying in the web is often benign (for example, templates), but 6–11% are commercial or possibly commercial. Most copies of Wikipedia (86%) are commercialized (link farming or advertisements). For phishing, we focus on PayPal, detecting 59% of PayPal-phish even without taking on intentional cloaking.

Categories
Social Students

graduation lunch in honor of Liang Zhu

In October we had a ANT research group lunch to celebrate the PhD graduation of Liang Zhu.  Congratulations on his accomplishments and we all enjoyed tasty dim sum.

A going-away lunch for Liang Zhu (on the left), celebrating his PhD graduation, with the ANT lab and family members.
A going-away lunch for Liang Zhu (on the left), celebrating his PhD graduation, with the ANT lab and family members.

Categories
Announcements Projects

new project “Plannning for Anycast as Anti-DDoS” (PAADDoS)

We are happy to announce a new project Plannning for Anycast as Anti-DDoS (PAADDoS).

The PAADDoS project’s goal is to defend against large-scale DDoS attacks by making anycast-based capacity more effective than it is today.

We will work toward this goal by (1) developing tools to map anycast catchments and baseline load, (2) develop methods to plan changes and their effects on catchments, (3) develop tools to estimate attack load and assist anycast reconfiguration during an attack. and (4) evaluate and integration of these tools with traditional DoS defenses.

We expect these innovations to improve service resilience in the face of DDoS attacks. Our tools will improve anycast agility during an attack, allowing capacity to be used effectively.

PAADDoS is a joint effort of the ANT Lab involving USC/ISI (PI: John Heidemann) and the Design and Analysis of Communication Systems group at the University of Twente (PI: Aiko Pras).

PAADDoS is supported by the DHS HSARPA Cyber Security Division via contract number HSHQDC-17-R-B0004-TTA.02-0006-I, and by NWO.

Categories
Publications Technical Report

new technical report “Plumb: Efficient Processing of Multi-Users Pipelines (Extended)”

We released a new technical report “Plumb: Efficient Processing of Multi-Users Pipelines (Extended)”, by Abdul Qadeer and John Heidemann, as ISI-TR-727.  It is available at https://www.isi.edu/publications/trpublic/pdfs/isi-tr-727.pdf

Benefits of processing de-duplication

Benefits of data de-duplication

From the abstract:

Services such as DNS and websites often produce streams of data that are consumed by analytics pipelines operated by multiple teams. Often this data is processed in large chunks (megabytes) to allow analysis of a block of time or to amortize costs. Such pipelines pose two problems: first, duplication of computation and storage may occur when parts of the pipeline are operated by different groups. Second, processing can be lumpy, with structural lumpiness occurring when different stages need different amounts of resources, and data lumpiness occurring when a block of  input requires increased resources. Duplication and structural lumpiness both can result in inefficient processing. Data lumpiness can cause pipeline failure or deadlock, for example if differences in DDoS traffic compared to normal can require 6× CPU. We propose Plumb, a framework to abstract file processing for a multi-stage pipeline. Plumb integrates pipelines contributed by multiple users, detecting and eliminating duplication of computation and intermediate storage. It tracks and adjusts computation of each stage, accommodating both structural and data lumpiness. We exercise Plumb with the processing pipeline for B-Root DNS traffic, where it will replace a hand-tuned system to provide one third the original latency by utilizing 22% fewer CPU and will address limitations that occur as multiple users process data and when DDoS traffic causes huge shifts in performance.

 

Categories
Papers Publications

New workshop paper “IP-Based IoT Device Detection”

We have published a new paper “IP-Based IoT Device Detection” in the Second ACM Workshop on Internet-of-Things Security and Privacy (IoTS&P 2018) in Budapest, Hungary, co-located with SIGCOMM 2018.

IoT devices we detect in use at a campus (Table 3 from [Guo18b])
From the abstract of our  paper:

Recent IoT-based DDoS attacks have exposed how vulnerable the Internet can be to millions of insufficiently secured IoT devices. To understand the risks of these attacks requires
learning about these IoT devices—where are they, how many are there, how are they changing? In this paper, we propose
a new method to find IoT devices in Internet to begin to assess this threat. Our approach requires observations of flow-level network traffic and knowledge of servers run by
the manufacturers of the IoT devices. We have developed our approach with 10 device models by 7 vendors and controlled
experiments. We apply our algorithm to observations from 6 days of Internet traffic at a college campus and partial traffic
from an IXP to detect IoT devices.

We make operational traffic we captured from 10 IoT devices we own public at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/iot/. We also use operational traffic of 21 IoT devices shared by University of New South Wales at http://149.171.189.1/.

This paper is joint work of Hang Guo and  John Heidemann from USC/ISI.