Tag: datasets

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Publications Technical Report

new technical report “When the Dike Breaks: Dissecting DNS Defenses During DDoS (extended)”

We released a new technical report “When the Dike Breaks: Dissecting DNS Defenses During DDoS (extended)”, ISI-TR-725, available at https://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Moura18a.pdf.

Moura18a Figure 6a, Answers received during a DDoS attack causing 100% packet loss with pre-loaded caches.

From the abstract:

The Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) is a frequent target of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, but such attacks have had very different outcomes—some attacks have disabled major public websites, while the external effects of other attacks have been minimal. While on one hand the DNS protocol is a relatively simple, the system has many moving parts, with multiple levels of caching and retries and replicated servers. This paper uses controlled experiments to examine how these mechanisms affect DNS resilience and latency, exploring both the client side’s DNS user experience, and server-side traffic. We find that, for about about 30% of clients, caching is not effective. However, when caches are full they allow about half of clients to ride out server outages, and caching and retries allow up to half of the clients to tolerate DDoS attacks that result in 90% query loss, and almost all clients to tolerate attacks resulting in 50% packet loss. The cost of such attacks to clients are greater median latency. For servers, retries during DDoS attacks increase normal traffic up to 8x. Our findings about caching and retries can explain why some real-world DDoS cause service outages for users while other large attacks have minimal visible effects.

Datasets from this paper are available at no cost and are listed at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/dns/#Moura18a_data.

 

Categories
Presentations

new talk “Internet Outages: Reliablity and Security” from U. of Oregon Cybersecurity Day 2018

John Heidemann gave the talk “Internet Outages: Reliablity and Security” at the University of Oregon Cybersecurity Day in Eugene, Oregon on April 23, 2018.  Slides are available at https://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann18e.pdf.

Network outages as a security problem.

From the abstract:

The Internet is central to our lives, but we know astoundingly little about it. Even though many businesses and individuals depend on it, how reliable is the Internet? Do policies and practices make it better in some places than others?

Since 2006, we have been studying the public face of the Internet to answer these questions. We take regular censuses, probing the entire IPv4 Internet address space. For more than two years we have been observing Internet reliability through active probing with Trinocular outage detection, revealing the effects of the Internet due to natural disasters like Hurricanes from Sandy to Harvey and Maria, configuration errors that sometimes affect millions of customers, and political events where governments have intervened in Internet operation. This talk will describe how it is possible to observe Internet outages today and what they are beginning to say about the Internet and about the physical world.

This talk builds on research over the last decade in IPv4 censuses and outage detection and includes the work of many of my collaborators.

Data from this talk is all available; see links on the last slide.

Categories
Papers Publications

new conference paper “Detecting ICMP Rate Limiting in the Internet” in PAM 2018

We have published a new conference “Detecting ICMP Rate Limiting in the Internet” in PAM 2018 (the Passive and Active Measurement Conference) in Berlin, Germany.

Figure 4 from [Guo18a] Confirming a block is rate limited with additional probing
Figure 4 from [Guo18a] confirming a bock is rate limited, comparing experimental results with models of rate-limited and non-rate-limited behavior.
From the abstract of our conference paper:

Comparing model and experimental effects of rate limiting (Figure 4 from [Guo18a] )
ICMP active probing is the center of many network measurements. Rate limiting to ICMP traffic, if undetected, could distort measurements and create false conclusions. To settle this concern, we look systematically for ICMP rate limiting in the Internet. We create FADER, a new algorithm that can identify rate limiting from user-side traces with minimal new measurement traffic. We validate the accuracy of FADER with many different network configurations in testbed experiments and show that it almost always detects rate limiting. With this confidence, we apply our algorithm to a random sample of the whole Internet, showing that rate limiting exists but that for slow probing rates, rate-limiting is very rare. For our random sample of 40,493 /24 blocks (about 2% of the responsive space), we confirm 6 blocks (0.02%!) see rate limiting at 0.39 packets/s per block. We look at higher rates in public datasets and suggest that fall-off in responses as rates approach 1 packet/s per /24 block is consistent with rate limiting. We also show that even very slow probing (0.0001 packet/s) can encounter rate limiting of NACKs that are concentrated at a single router near the prober.

Datasets we used in this paper are all public. ISI Internet Census and Survey data (including it71w, it70w, it56j, it57j and it58j census and survey) are available at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/index.html. ZMap 50-second experiments data are from their WOOT 14 paper and can be obtained from ZMap authors upon request.

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

Categories
Publications Technical Report

new technical report “Back Out: End-to-end Inference of Common Points-of-Failure in the Internet (extended)”

We released a new technical report “Back Out: End-to-end Inference of Common Points-of-Failure in the Internet (extended)”, ISI-TR-724, available at https://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann18b.pdf.

From the abstract:

Clustering (from our event clustering algorithm) of 2014q3 outages from 172/8, showing 7 weeks including the 2014-08-27 Time Warner outage.

Internet reliability has many potential weaknesses: fiber rights-of-way at the physical layer, exchange-point congestion from DDOS at the network layer, settlement disputes between organizations at the financial layer, and government intervention the political layer. This paper shows that we can discover common points-of-failure at any of these layers by observing correlated failures. We use end-to-end observations from data-plane-level connectivity of edge hosts in the Internet. We identify correlations in connectivity: networks that usually fail and recover at the same time suggest common point-of-failure. We define two new algorithms to meet these goals. First, we define a computationally-efficient algorithm to create a linear ordering of blocks to make correlated failures apparent to a human analyst. Second, we develop an event-based clustering algorithm that directly networks with correlated failures, suggesting common points-of-failure. Our algorithms scale to real-world datasets of millions of networks and observations: linear ordering is O(n log n) time and event-based clustering parallelizes with Map/Reduce. We demonstrate them on three months of outages for 4 million /24 network prefixes, showing high recall (0.83 to 0.98) and precision (0.72 to 1.0) for blocks that respond. We also show that our algorithms generalize to identify correlations in anycast catchments and routing.

Datasets from this paper are available at no cost and are listed at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/outage/, and we expect to release the software for this paper in the coming months (contact us if you are interested).

Categories
Announcements Outages

new website for browsing Internet outages

We are happy to announce a new website at https://ant.isi.edu/outage/world/ that supports our Internet outage data collected from Trinocular.

The ANT Outage world browser, showing Hurricane Irma just after landfall in Florida in Sept. 2017.

Our website supports browsing more than two years of outage data, organized by geography and time.  The map is a google-maps-style world map, with circle on it at even intervals (every 0.5 to 2 degrees of latitude and longitude, depending on the zoom level).  Circle sizes show how many /24 network blocks are out in that location, while circle colors show the percentage of outages, from blue (only a few percent) to red (approaching 100%).

We hope that this website makes our outage data more accessible to researchers and the public.

The raw data underlying this website is available on request, see our outage dataset webpage.

The research is funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cyber Security Division (through the LACREND and Retro-Future Bridge and Outages projects) and Michael Keston, a real estate entrepreneur and philanthropist (through the Michael Keston Endowment).  Michael Keston helped support this the initial version of this website, and DHS has supported our outage data collection and algorithm development.

The website was developed by Dominik Staros, ISI web developer and owner of Imagine Web Consulting, based on data collected by ISI researcher Yuri Pradkin. It builds on prior work by Pradkin, Heidemann and USC’s Lin Quan in ISI’s Analysis of Network Traffic Lab.

ISI has featured our new website on the ISI news page.

 

Categories
Announcements Projects

new project LACANIC

We are happy to announce a new project, LACANIC, the Los Angeles/Colorado Application and Network Information Community.

The LACANIC project’s goal is to develop datasets to improve Internet security and readability. We distribute these datasets through the DHS IMPACT program.

As part of this work we:

  • provide regular data collection to collect long-term, longitudinal data
  • curate datasets for special events
  • build websites and portals to help make data accessible to casual users
  • develop new measurement approaches

We provide several types of datasets:

  • anonymized packet headers and network flow data, often to document events like distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and regular traffic
  • Internet censuses and surveys for IPv4 to document address usage
  • Internet hitlists and histories, derived from IPv4 censuses, to support other topology studies
  • application data, like DNS and Internet-of-Things mapping, to document regular traffic and DDoS events
  • and we are developing other datasets

LACANIC allows us to continue some of the data collection we were doing as part of the LACREND project, as well as develop new methods and ways of sharing the data.

LACANIC is a joint effort of the ANT Lab involving USC/ISI (PI: John Heidemann) and Colorado State University (PI: Christos Papadopoulos).

We thank DHS’s Cyber Security Division for their continued support!

 

Categories
Papers Publications

new conference paper “A Look at Router Geolocation in Public and Commercial Databases” in IMC 2017

The paper “A Look at Router Geolocation in Public and Commercial Databases” has appeared in the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) on November 1-3, 2017 in London, United Kingdom.

From the abstract:

Regional breakdown of the geolocation error for the geolocation databases vs. ground truth data.

Internet measurement research frequently needs to map infrastructure components, such as routers, to their physical locations. Although public and commercial geolocation services are often used for this purpose, their accuracy when applied to network infrastructure has not been sufficiently assessed. Prior work focused on evaluating the overall accuracy of geolocation databases, which is dominated by their performance on end-user IP addresses. In this work, we evaluate the reliability of router geolocation in databases. We use a dataset of about 1.64M router interface IP addresses extracted from the CAIDA Ark dataset to examine the country- and city-level coverage and consistency of popular public and commercial geolocation databases. We also create and provide a ground-truth dataset of 16,586 router interface IP addresses and their city-level locations, and use it to evaluate the databases’ accuracy with a regional breakdown analysis. Our results show that the databases are not reliable for geolocating routers and that there is room to improve their country- and city-level accuracy. Based on our results, we present a set of recommendations to researchers concerning the use of geolocation databases to geolocate routers.

The work in this paper was joint work by Manaf Gharaibeh, Anant Shah, Han Zhang, Christos Papadopoulos (Colorado State University), Brad Huffaker (CAIDA / UC San Diego), and Roya Ensafi (University of Michigan). The findings of this work are highlighted in an APNIC blog post “Should we trust the geolocation databases to geolocate routers?”. The ground truth datasets used in the paper are available via IMPACT.

Categories
Papers Publications

new conference paper “Recursives in the Wild: Engineering Authoritative DNS Servers” in IMC 2017

The paper “Recursives in the Wild: Engineering Authoritative DNS Servers” will appear in the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) on November 1-3, 2017 in London, United Kingdom.

Recursive DNS server selection of authoritatives, per continent. (Figure 4 from [Mueller17b].)
From the abstract:

In In Internet Domain Name System (DNS), services operate authoritative name servers that individuals query through recursive resolvers. Operators strive to provide reliability by operating multiple name servers (NS), each on a separate IP address, and by using IP anycast to allow NSes to provide service from many physical locations. To meet their goals of minimizing latency and balancing load across NSes and anycast, operators need to know how recursive resolvers select an NS, and how that interacts with their NS deployments. Prior work has shown some recursives search for low latency, while others pick an NS at random or round robin, but did not examine how prevalent each choice was. This paper provides the first analysis of how recursives select between name servers in the wild, and from that we provide guidance to operators how to engineer their name servers to reach their goals. We conclude that all NSes need to be equally strong and therefore we recommend to deploy IP anycast at every single authoritative.

All datasets used in this paper (but one) are available at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/dns/index.html#recursives .

Categories
Papers Publications

new conference paper “Broad and Load-aware Anycast Mapping with Verfploeter” in IMC 2017

The paper “Broad and Load-aware Anycast Mapping with Verfploeter” will appear in the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) on November 1-3, 2017 in London, United Kingdom.

From the abstract:

IP anycast provides DNS operators and CDNs with automatic failover and reduced latency by breaking the Internet into catchments, each served by a different anycast site. Unfortunately, understanding and predicting changes to catchments as anycast sites are added or removed has been challenging. Current tools such as RIPE Atlas or commercial equivalents map from thousands of vantage points (VPs), but their coverage can be inconsistent around the globe. This paper proposes Verfploeter, a new method that maps anycast catchments using active probing. Verfploeter provides around 3.8M passive VPs, 430x the 9k physical VPs in RIPE Atlas, providing coverage of the vast majority of networks around the globe. We then add load information from prior service logs to provide calibrated predictions of anycast changes. Verfploeter has been used to evaluate the new anycast deployment for B-Root, and we also report its use of a nine-site anycast testbed. We show that the greater coverage made possible by Verfploeter’s active probing is necessary to see routing differences in regions that have sparse coverage from RIPE Atlas, like South America and China.

Distribution of load across two anycast sites of B-root using Verfploeter.

The work in this paper was joint work by Wouter B. de Vries, Ricardo de O. Schmidt (Univ. of Twente), Wes Hardaker, John Heidemann (USC/ISI), Pieter-Tjerk de Boer and Aiko Pras (Univ. of Twente). The datasets used in the paper are available at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/anycast/index.html#verfploeter.

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.