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ANT research group lunch

At the end of June we had an ANT research group lunch to celebrate four (!) recent PhD defenses in 2020 and 2021: Hang Guo, Calvin Ardi, Lan Wei, and Abdul Qadeer. Although not everyone could be there (Hang has already moved for his new job), and the ANT lab includes a number of people outside of L.A. who could not make it, us students, staff, and family in L.A. had a great time at Vista del Mar Park near the beach!

A big thanks to Basileal Imana and ASM Rizvi for coordinating delivery of Ethiopian food for lunch.

We are also very thankful that vaccine availability in the U.S. is widespread and we were able to get together face-to-face after a year of Covid limitations. I’m happy that we’ve been able to do good work throughout the pandemic with remote collaboration tools and occasional on-site access, but it was nice to see old friends face-to-face again and share a meal. We hope the fall’s in-person classes at USC go well.

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new conference paper “Anycast in Context: A Tale of Two Systems” at SIGCOMM 2021

We published a new paper “Anycast in Context: A Tale of Two Systems” by Thomas Koch, Ke Li, Calvin Ardi*, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Matt Calder**, and John Heidemann* (of Columbia, where not otherwise indicated, *USC/ISI, and **Microsoft and Columbia) at ACM SIGCOMM 2021.

From the abstract:

Anycast is used to serve content including web pages and DNS, and anycast deployments are growing. However, prior work examining root DNS suggests anycast deployments incur significant inflation, with users often routed to suboptimal sites. We reassess anycast performance, first extending prior analysis on inflation in the root DNS. We show that inflation is very common in root DNS, affecting more than 95% of users. However, we then show root DNS latency hardly matters to users because caching is so effective. These findings lead us to question: is inflation inherent to anycast, or can inflation be limited when it matters? To answer this question, we consider Microsoft’s anycast CDN serving latency-sensitive content. Here, latency matters orders of magnitude more than for root DNS. Perhaps because of this need, only 35% of CDN users experience any inflation, and the amount they experience is smaller than for root DNS. We show that CDN anycast latency has little inflation due to extensive peering and engineering. These results suggest prior claims of anycast inefficiency reflect experiments on a single application rather than anycast’s technical potential, and they demonstrate the importance of context when measuring system performance.

Tom also blogged about this work at APNIC.

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new conference paper “Efficient Processing of Streaming Data using Multiple Abstractions” at IEEE Cloud

We have published a new paper “Efficient Processing of Streaming Data using Multiple Abstractions” at the IEEE Cloud 2021 conference. (to be available at https://conferences.computer.org/cloud/2021/)

We show that one framework can efficiently support multiple abstractions. We provide three abstractions of Block, Windowed, and Stateful streaming and demonstrate that many application classes can be developed with ease, correctness, and low processing latency.

From the abstract of our paper:

Large websites and distributed systems employ sophisticated analytics to evaluate successes to celebrate and problems to be addressed. As analytics grow, different teams often require different frameworks, with dozens of packages supporting with streaming and batch processing, SQL and no-SQL. Bringing multiple frameworks to bear on a large, changing dataset often create challenges where data transitions—these impedance mismatches can create brittle glue logic and performance problems that consume developer time. We propose Plumb, a meta-framework that can bridge three different abstractions to meet the needs of a large class of applications in a common workflow. Large-block streaming (Block-Streaming) is suitable for single-pass applications that care about the temporal and spatial locality. Windowed-Streaming allows applications to process a group of data and many reductions. Stateful-Streaming enables applications to keep a long-term state and always-on behavior. We show that it is possible to bridge abstractions, with a common, high-level workflow specification, while the system transitions data batch processing and block- and record-level streaming as required. The challenge in bridging abstractions is to minimize latency while allowing applications to select between sequential and parallel operation, while handling out-of-order data delivery, component failures, and providing clear semantics in the face of missing data. We demonstrate these abstractions evaluating a 10-stage workflow of DNS analytics that has been in production use with Plumb for 2 years, comparing to a brittle hand-built system that has run for more than 3 years.

This conference paper is joint work of Abdul Qadeer and  John Heidemann from USC/ISI.

Plumb is open source software and will be available at: https://ant.isi.edu/software/plumb/index.html

Update 2021-09-26: This paper was given a “special paper award” at IEEE Conference on Cloud Computing 2021! Congratulations, Abdul!

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new workshop report “Overcoming Measurement Barriers to Internet Research” (WOMBIR 2021) in ACM CCR

WOMBIR 2021 was the NSF-sponsored Workshop on Overcoming Measurement Barriers to Internet Research. This workshop was hold in two sessions over several days in January and April 2021, chaired by k.c. claffy, David Clark, Fabian Bustamente, John Heidemann, and Mattijs Monjker. The final report includes contributions from Aaron Schulman and Ellen Zegura as well as all the workshop participants.

From the abstract:

In January and April 2021 we held the Workshop on Overcoming Measurement Barriers to Internet Research (WOMBIR) with the goal of understanding challenges in network and security data set collection and sharing. Most workshop attendees provided white papers describing their perspectives, and many participated in short-talks and discussion in two virtual workshops over five days. That discussion produced consensus around several points. First, many aspects of the Internet are characterized by decreasing visibility of important network properties, which is in tension with the Internet’s role as critical infrastructure. We discussed three specific research areas that illustrate this tension: security, Internet access; and mobile networking. We discussed visibility challenges at all layers of the networking stack, and the challenge of gathering data and validating inferences. Important data sets require longitudinal (long-term, ongoing) data collection and sharing, support for which is more challenging for Internet research than other fields. We discussed why a combination of technical and policy methods are necessary to safeguard privacy when using or sharing measurement data. Workshop participant proposed several opportunities to accelerate progress, some of which require coordination across government, industry, and academia.

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new talk “Observing the Global IPv4 Internet: What IP Addresses Show” as an SKC Science and Technology Webinar

John Heidemann gave the talk “Observing the Global IPv4 Internet: What IP Addresses Show” at the SKC Science and Technology Webinar, hosted by Deepankar Medhi (U. Missouri-Kansas City and NSF) on June 18, 2021.  A video of the talk is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A_gFXi2WeY. Slides are available at https://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann21a.pdf.

From the abstract:Covid and non-Covid network changes in India; part of a talk about measuring the IPv4 Internet.

Since 2014 the ANT lab at USC has been observing the visible IPv4 Internet (currently 5 million networks measured every 11 minutes) to detect network outages. This talk explores how we use this large-scale, active measurement to estimate Internet reliability and understand the effects of real-world events such as hurricanes. We have recently developed new algorithms to identify Covid-19-related Work-from-Home and other Internet shutdowns in this data. Our Internet outage work is joint work of John Heidemann, Lin Quan, Yuri Pradkin, Guillermo Baltra, Xiao Song, and Asma Enayet with contributions from Ryan Bogutz, Dominik Staros, Abdulla Alwabel, and Aqib Nisar.

This project is joint work of a number of people listed in the abstract above, and is supported by NSF 2028279 (MINCEQ) and CNS-2007106 (EIEIO). All data from this paper is available at no cost to researchers.

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the tsuNAME vulnerability in DNS

On 2020-05-06, researchers at SIDN Labs, (the .nl registry), InternetNZ (the .nz registry) , and at the Information Science Institute at the University of Southern California publicly disclosed tsuNAME, a vulnerability in some DNS resolver software that can be weaponized to carry out DDoS attacks against authoritative DNS servers.

TsuNAME is a problem that results from cyclic dependencies in DNS records, where two NS records point at each other. We found that some recursive resolvers would follow this cycle, greatly amplifying an initial queries and stresses the authoritative servers providing those records.

Our technical report describes a tsuNAME related event observed in 2020 at the .nz authoritative servers, when two domains were misconfigured with cyclic dependencies. It caused the total traffic to growth by 50%. In the report, we show how an EU-based ccTLD experienced a 10x traffic growth due to cyclic dependent misconfigurations.

We refer DNS operators and developers to our security advisory that provides recommendations for how to mitigate or detect tsuNAME.

We have also created a tool, CycleHunter, for detecting cyclic dependencies in DNS zones. Following responsible disclosure practices, we provided operators and software vendors time to address the problem first. We are happy that Google public DNS and Cisco OpenDNS both took steps to protect their public resolvers, and that PowerDNS and NLnet have confirmed their current software is not affected.

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congratulations to Xiao Song for receiving a 2021 USC Viterbi award for MS Student Research

Congratulations to Xiao Song for receiving a 2021 USC Viterbi School of Engineering award for Masters Student Research in the Computer Science Department. This award was on the basis of her work observing work-from-home due to Covid-19, as reported in her poster at the NSF PREPARE-VO Workshop and our arXive technical report.

The award was presented at the May 2021 Viterbi Masters Student Awards Ceremony.

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congratulations to Abdul Qadeer for his PhD

I would like to congratulate Dr. Abdul Qadeer for defending his PhD at the University of Southern California in March 2021 and completing his doctoral dissertation “Efficient Processing of Streaming Data in Multi-User and Multi-Abstraction Workflows”.

From the abstract:

Abdul Qadeer after his defense.

Ever-increasing data and evolving processing needs force enterprises to scale-out expensive computational resources to prioritize processing for timely results. Teams process their organization’s data either independently or using ad hoc sharing mechanisms. Often different users start with the same data and the same initial stages (decrypt, decompress, clean, anonymize). As their workflows evolve, later stages often diverge, and different stages may work best with different abstractions. The result is workflows with some overlap, some variations, and multiple transitions where data handling changes between continuous, windowed, and per-block. The system processing this diverse, multi-user, multi-abstraction workflow should be efficient and safe, but also must cope with fault recovery.

Analytics from multiple users can cause redundant processing and data, or encounter performance anomalies due to skew. Skew arises due to static or dynamic imbalance in the workflow stages. Both redundancy and skew waste compute resources and add latency to results. When users bridge between multiple abstractions, such as from per-block processing to windowed processing, they often employ custom code. These transitions can be error prone due to corner cases, can easily add latency as an inefficiency, and custom code is often a source of errors and maintenance difficulty. We need new solutions to manage the above challenges and to expose opportunities for data sharing explicitly. Our thesis is: new methods enable efficient processing of multi-user and multi-abstraction workflows of streaming data. We present two new methods for efficient stream processing—optimizations for multi-user workflows, and multiple abstractions for application coverage and efficient bridging.

These algorithms use a pipeline-graph to detect duplication of code and data across multiple users and cleanly delineate workflow stages for skew management. The pipeline-graph is our job description language that allows developers to specify their need easily and enables our system to automatically detect duplication and manage skew. The pipeline-graph acts as a shared canvas for collaboration amongst users to extend each other’s work. To efficiently implement our deduplication and skew management algorithms, we present streaming data to processing stages as fixed-sized but large blocks. Large-blocks have low meta-data overhead per user, provide good parallelism, and help with fault recovery.

Our second method enables applications to use a different abstraction on a different workflow stage. We provide three key abstractions and show that they cover many classes of analytics and our framework can bridge them efficiently. We provide Block-Streaming, Windowed-Streaming, and Stateful-Streaming abstractions. Block-Streaming is suitable for single-pass applications that care about temporal or spatial locality. Windowed-Streaming allows applications to process accumulated data (time-aligned blocks to sync with external information) and reductions like summation, averages, or other MapReduce-style analytics. We believe our three abstractions allow many classes of analytics and enable processing of one block, many blocks, or infinite stream. Plumb allows multiple abstractions in different parts of the workflow and provides efficient bridging between them so that users could make complex analytics from individual stages without worrying about data movement.

Our methods aim for good throughput, low latency, and clean and easy-to-use support for more applications to achieve better efficiency than our prior hand-tuned but often brittle system. The Plumb framework is the implementation of our solutions and a testbed to validate them. We use real-world workloads from the B-Root DNS domain to demonstrate effectiveness of our solutions. Our processing deduplication increases throughput up to $6\times$, reduces storage by 75%, as compared to their pre-Plumb counterparts. Plumb reduces CPU wastage due to structural skew up to half and reduces latency due to computational skew by 50%. Plumb has cut per-block latency by 74% and latency of daily statistics by 97%, while reducing code size by 58% and lowering manual intervention to handle problems by 73% as compared to pre-Plumb system.

The operational use of Plumb for the B-Root service provides a multi-year validation of our design choices under many traffic conditions. Over the last three years, Plumb has processed more than 12PB of DNS packet data and daily statistics. We show that our abstractions apply to many applications in the domain of networking big-data and beyond.

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congratulations to Manaf Gharaibeh for his PhD

I would like to congratulate Dr. Manaf Gharaibeh for defending his PhD at Colorado State University in February 2020 and completing his doctoral dissertation “Characterizing the Visible Address Space to Enable Efficient, Continuous IP Geolocation” in March 2020.

From the abstract:

Manaf Gharaibeh’s phd defense, with Christos Papadopoulos.

Internet Protocol (IP) geolocation is vital for location-dependent applications and many network research problems. The benefits to applications include enabling content customization, proximal server selection, and management of digital rights based on the location of users, to name a few. The benefits to networking research include providing geographic context useful for several purposes, such as to study the geographic deployment of Internet resources, bind cloud data to a location, and to study censorship and monitoring, among others.
The measurement-based IP geolocation is widely considered as the state-of-the-art client-independent approach to estimate the location of an IP address. However, full measurement-based geolocation is prohibitive when applied continuously to the entire Internet to maintain up-to-date IP-to-location mappings. Furthermore, many IP address blocks rarely move, making it unnecessary to perform such full geolocation.
The thesis of this dissertation states that \emph{we can enable efficient, continuous IP geolocation by identifying clusters of co-located IP addresses and their location stability from latency observations.} In this statement, a cluster indicates a group of an arbitrary number of adjacent co-located IP addresses (a few up to a /16). Location stability indicates a measure of how often an IP block changes location. We gain efficiency by allowing IP geolocation systems to geolocate IP addresses as units, and by detecting when a geolocation update is required, optimizations not explored in prior work. We present several studies to support this thesis statement.
We first present a study to evaluate the reliability of router geolocation in popular geolocation services, complementing prior work that evaluates end-hosts geolocation in such services. The results show the limitations of these services and the need for better solutions, motivating our work to enable more accurate approaches. Second, we present a method to identify clusters of \emph{co-located} IP addresses by the similarity in their latency. Identifying such clusters allows us to geolocate them efficiently as units without compromising accuracy. Third, we present an efficient delay-based method to identify IP blocks that move over time, allowing us to recognize when geolocation updates are needed and avoid frequent geolocation of the entire Internet to maintain up-to-date geolocation. In our final study, we present a method to identify cellular blocks by their distinctive variation in latency compared to WiFi and wired blocks. Our method to identify cellular blocks allows a better interpretation of their latency estimates and to study their geographic properties without the need for proprietary data from operators or users.