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new talk “Distributed Denial-of-Service: What Datasets Can Help?” at ACSAC 2016

John Heidemann gave the talk “Distributed Denial-of-Service: What Datasets Can Help?” at ACSAC 2016 in Universal City, California, USA on December 7, 2016.  Slides are available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann16d.pdf.

heidemann16d_iconFrom the abstract:

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.

Datasets from the paper are available at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/ and at https://impactcybertrust.org.

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Announcements Projects

new workshop program for DINR-2016 (DNS and Internet Naming Research Directions)

We’re happy to be hosting DINR-2016 (DNS and Internet Naming Research Directions).

The workshop program is now online; folks interested in joining us should contact the chairs.

We’re looking forward to an exciting day of many short talks!

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Presentations

new talk “Anycast vs. DDoS: Evaluating Nov. 30” at DNS-OARC

John Heidemann gave the talk “Anycast vs. DDoS: Evaluating Nov. 30” at DNS-OARC in Dallas, Texas, USA on October 16, 2016.  Slides are available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann16c.pdf.

 

Possible outcomes of anycast under stress, a slide from a talk about the Nov. 30, 2015 Root DNS event.
Possible outcomes of anycast under stress, a slide from a talk about the Nov. 30, 2015 Root DNS event.

From the abstract:

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks continue to be a major threat in the Internet today. DDoS attacks overwhelm target services with requests or other “bogus” traffic, causing requests from legitimate users to be shut out. A common defense against DDoS is to replicate the service in multiple physical locations or sites. If all sites announce a common IP address, BGP will associate users around the Internet with a nearby site, defining the catchment of that site. Anycast adds resilience against DDoS both by increasing capacity to the aggregate of many sites, and allowing each catchment to contain attack traffic leaving other sites unaffected. IP anycast is widely used for commercial CDNs and essential infrastructure such as DNS, but there is little evaluation of anycast under stress.

This talk will provide a first evaluation of several anycast services under stress with public data. Our subject is the Internet’s Root Domain Name Service, made up of 13 independently designed services (“letters”, 11 with IP anycast) running at more than 500 sites. Many of these services were stressed by sustained traffic at 100x normal load on Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, 2015. We use public data for most of our analysis to examine how different services respond to the these events. In our analysis we identify two policies by operators: (1) sites may absorb attack traffic, containing the damage but reducing service to some users, or (2) they may withdraw routes to shift both legitimate and bogus traffic to other sites. We study how these deployment policies result in different levels of service to different users, during and immediately after the attacks.

We also show evidence of collateral damage on other services located near the attack targets. The work is based on analysis of DNS response from around 9000 RIPE Atlas vantage points (or “probes”), agumented by RSSAC-002 reports from 5 root letters and BGP data from BGPmon. We examine DNS performance for each Root Letter, for anycast sites inside specific letters, and for specific servers at one site.

This talk is based on the work in the paper “Anycast vs. DDoS: Evaluating the November 2015 Root DNS Event” at appear at  IMC 2016, by Giovane C. M. Moura, Ricardo de O. Schmidt, John Heidemann, Wouter B. de Vries, Moritz Müller,  Lan Wei, and Christian Hesselman.

Datasets from the paper are available at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/anycast/

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Presentations

new talk “Anycast Latency: How Many Sites are Enough?” at DNS-OARC

John Heidemann gave the talk “Anycast Latency: How Many Sites are Enough?” at DNS-OARC in Dallas, Texas, USA on October 16, 2016.  Slides are available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann16b.pdf.

Comparing actual (obtained) anycast latency against optimal possible anycast latency, for 4 different anycast deployments (each a Root Letter). From the talk [Heidemann16b], based on data from [Moura16b].
Comparing actual (obtained) anycast latency against optimal possible anycast latency, for 4 different anycast deployments (each a Root Letter). From the talk [Heidemann16b], based on data from [Moura16b].
From the abstract:

This talk will evaluate anycast latency. An anycast service uses multiple sites to provide high availability, capacity and redundancy, with BGP routing associating users to nearby anycast sites. Routing defines the catchment of the users 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 must 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 worldwide vantage points (VPs) in RIPE Atlas. (Given the VPs uneven geographic distribution, we evaluate and control for potential bias.) Key results of our study are to 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 nodes. We show how often users see the closest anycast site, and how strongly routing policy affects site selection.

This talk is based on the work in the technical report “Anycast Latency: How Many Sites Are Enough?” (ISI-TR-2016-708), by Ricardo de O. Schmidt, John Heidemann, and Jan Harm Kuipers.

Datasets from the paper are available at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/anycast/

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Presentations

new talk “New Opportunities for Research and Experiments in Internet Naming And Identification” at the AIMS Workshop

John Heidemann gave the talk “New Opportunities for Research and Experiments in Internet Naming And Identification” at the AIMS 2016 workshop at CAIDA, La Jolla, California on February 11, 2016.  Slides are available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann16a.pdf.

Needs for new naming and identity research prompt new research infrastructure, enabling new research directions.
Needs for new naming and identity research prompt new research infrastructure, enabling new research directions.

From the abstract:

DNS is central to Internet use today, yet research on DNS today is challenging: many researchers find it challenging to create realistic experiments at scale and representative of the large installed base, and datasets are often short (two days or less) or otherwise limited. Yes DNS evolution presses on: improvements to privacy are needed, and extensions like DANE provide an opportunity for DNS to improve security and support identity management. We exploring how to grow the research community and enable meaningful work on Internet naming. In this talk we will propose new research infrastructure to support to realistic DNS experiments and longitudinal data studies. We are looking for feedback on our proposed approaches and input about your pressing research problems in Internet naming and identification.

For more information see our project website.

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Presentations

new talk “Internet Populations (Good and Bad): Measurement, Estimation, and Correlation” at the ICERM Workshop on Cybersecurity

John Heidemann gave the talk “Internet Populations (Good and Bad): Measurement, Estimation, and Correlation” at the ICERM Workshop on Cybersecurity at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island on October 22, 2014. Slides are available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann14e/.

Can we improve the mathematical tools we use to measure and understand the Internet?
Can we improve the mathematical tools we use to measure and understand the Internet?

From the abstract:

Our research studies the Internet’s public face. Since 2006 we have been taking censuses of the Internet address space (pinging all IPv4 addresses) every 3 months. Since 2012 we have studied network outages and events like Hurricane Sandy, using probes of much of the Internet every 11 minutes. Most recently we have evaluated the diurnal Internet, finding countries where most people turn off their computers at night. Finally, we have looked at network reputation, identifying how spam generation correlates with network location, and others have studies multiple measurements of “network reputation”.

A common theme across this work is one must estimate characteristics of the edge of the Internet in spite of noisy measurements and a underlying changes. One also need to compare and correlate these imperfect measurements with other factors (from GDP to telecommunications policies).

How do these applications relate to the mathematics of census taking and measurement, estimation, and correlation? Are there tools we should be using that we aren’t? Do the properties of the Internet suggest new approaches (for example where rapid full enumeration is possible)? Does correlation and estimates of network “badness” help us improve cybersecurity by treating different parts of the network differently?

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Presentations

new talk “Measuring DANE TLSA Deployment” given at DNS-OARC

Liang Zhu gave the talk “Measuring DANE TLSA Deployment”, given at the Fall DNS-OARC meeting in Los Angeles, California on Oct 12, 2014.  Slides are available: http://www.isi.edu/~liangzhu/presentation/dns-oarc/dane_tlsa_survey.pdf

From the abstract:

The DANE (DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities) framework uses DNSSEC to provide a source of trust, and with TLSA it can serve as a root of trust for TLS certificates. This alternative to traditional certificate authorities is important given the risks inherent in trusting hundreds of organizations—risks already demonstrated with multiple compromises. The TLSA protocol was published in 2012, and this talk presents the first systematic study of its deployment. We studied TLSA usage, developing a tool that actively probes all signed zones in .com and .net for TLSA records. We find the TLSA use is early: in our latest measurement, of the 461k signed zones, we find only 701 TLSA names. We characterize how it is being used so far, and find that around 7–12% of TLSA records are invalid. We find 31% of TLSA responses are larger than 1500 Bytes and get IP fragmented.

The work in the talk is by Liang Zhu (USC/ISI), Duane Wessels and Allison Mankin (both of Verisign), and John Heidemann (USC/ISI).

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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.

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Presentations

new talk “Long-term Data Collection and Analysis of Outages at the Edge” given at the AIMS workshop

John Heidemann gave the talk “Long-term Data Collection and Analysis of Outages at the Edge” at UCSD, San Diego, California on Feb. 8, 2013 as part of the CAIDA Active Internet Measurement Systems (AIMS) Workshop.  Slides are available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann13e.html.

talk_icon

This talk describes our analysis of outages in edge networks at the time of Hurricane Sandy, and how that work was enabled by long-term data collection. The analysis showed U.S. networks had double the outage rate (from 0.2% to 0.4%) on 2012-10-30, the day after Sandy landfall, and recovered after four days. We highlighted long-term data collection of Internet Surveys, a random sample of about 41,000 /24 blocks, and the characteristics that make that data suitable for re-analysis. The talk was part of the CAIDA Workshop on Active Internet Measurement Systems, hosted at UCSD.

This work is based on our recent technical report   “A Preliminary Analysis of Network Outages During Hurricane Sandy“, joint work of John Heidemann, Lin Quan, and Yuri Pradkin.

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Presentations

new abstract “Third-Party Measurement of Network Outages in Hurricane Sandy” and talk with video at FCC Workshop on Network Resiliency

We recently posted our abstract “Third-Party Measurement of Network Outages in Hurricane Sandy” at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann13c.html and the talk “Active Probing of Edge Networks: Hurricane Sandy and Beyond” at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann13d.html

These were part of the FCC Workshop on Network Resiliency at Brooklyn Law College, Brooklyn, NY on Feb. 6, 2013, chaired by Henning Schulzrinne.

Video from our talk and for the whole workshop is on YouTube.

fcc_youtube

A summary of the talk:

This talk summarized our analysis of outages in edge networks at the time of Hurricane Sandy. This analysis showed U.S. networks had double the outage rate (from 0.2% to 0.4%) on 2012-10-30, the day after Sandy landfall, and recovered after four days. It also describes our goal of tracking all outages in the Internet. The talk was part of the FCC workshop on Network Resiliency, hosted at Brooklyn Law College by Henning Schulzrinne.

This work is based on our recent technical report   “A Preliminary Analysis of Network Outages During Hurricane Sandy“, joint work of John Heidemann, Lin Quan, and Yuri Pradkin.