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Papers Publications

new conference best paper “External Evaluation of Discrimination Mitigation Efforts in Meta’s Ad Delivery”

Our new paper “External Evaluation of Discrimination Mitigation Efforts in Meta’s Ad Delivery” (PDF) will appear at The eighth annual ACM FAccT conference (FAccT 2025) being held from June 23-26, 2025 in Athens, Greece.

We are happy to note that this paper was awarded Best Paper, one of the three best paper awards at FAccT 2025!

Comparision of total reach and cost per 1000 reach with and without VRS enabled (Figure 5a)

From the abstract:

The 2022 settlement between Meta and the U.S. Department of Justice to resolve allegations of discriminatory advertising resulted is a first-of-its-kind change to Meta’s ad delivery system aimed to address algorithmic discrimination in its housing ad delivery. In this work, we explore direct and indirect effects of both the settlement’s choice of terms and the Variance Reduction System (VRS) implemented by Meta on the actual reduction in discrimination. We first show that the settlement terms allow for an implementation that does not meaningfully improve access to opportunities for individuals. The settlement measures impact of ad delivery in terms of impressions, instead of unique individuals reached by an ad; it allows the platform to level down access, reducing disparities by decreasing the overall access to opportunities; and it allows the platform to selectively apply VRS to only small advertisers. We then conduct experiments to evaluate VRS with real-world ads, and show that while VRS does reduce variance, it also raises advertiser costs (measured per-individuals-reached), therefore decreasing user exposure to opportunity ads for a given ad budget. VRS thus passes the cost of decreasing variance to advertisers}. Finally, we explore an alternative approach to achieve the settlement goals, that is significantly more intuitive and transparent than VRS. We show our approach outperforms VRS by both increasing ad exposure for users from all groups and reducing cost to advertisers, thus demonstrating that the increase in cost to advertisers when implementing the settlement is not inevitable. Our methodologies use a black-box approach that relies on capabilities available to any regular advertiser, rather than on privileged access to data, allowing others to reproduce or extend our work.

All data in this paper is publicly available to researchers at our datasets webpage.

This paper is a joint work of Basileal Imana, Zeyu Shen, and Aleksandra Korolova from Princeton University, and John Heidemann from USC/ISI. This work was supported in part by NSF grants CNS-1956435, CNS-2344925, and CNS-2319409.

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Papers Publications

new conference paper “Anycast vs. DDoS: Evaluating the November 2015 Root DNS Event” in IMC 2016

The paper “Anycast vs. DDoS: Evaluating the November 2015 Root DNS Event” will appear at ACM Internet Measurement Conference in November 2016 in Santa Monica, California, USA. (available at http://www.isi.edu/~weilan/PAPER/IMC2016camera.pdf)

From the abstract:

RIPE Atlas VPs going to different anycast sites when under stress. Colors indicate different sites, with black showing unsuccessful queries. [Moura16b, figure 11b]

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 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 addresses 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 paper provides the 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 100 times 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. We see how different anycast deployments respond to stress, and identify two policies: sites may absorb attack traffic, containing the damage but reducing service to some users, or they may withdraw routes to shift both good and bad traffic to other sites. We study how these deployments policies result in different levels of service to different users. We also show evidence of collateral damage on other services located near the attacks.

This IMC paper is joint work of  Giovane C. M. Moura, Moritz Müller, Cristian Hesselman (SIDN Labs), Ricardo de O. Schmidt, Wouter B. de Vries (U. Twente), John Heidemann, Lan Wei (USC/ISI). 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/.

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Publications Technical Report

new technical report “Anycast vs. DDoS: Evaluating the November 2015 Root DNS Event”

We have released a new technical report “Anycast vs. DDoS: Evaluating the November 2015 Root DNS Event”, ISI-TR-2016-709, available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Moura16a.pdf

From the abstract:

[Moura16a] Figure 3
[Moura16a] Figure 3: reachability at several root letters (anycast instances) during two events with very heavy traffic.

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 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 addresses 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 paper provides the 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 100 times 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. We see how different anycast deployments respond to stress, and identify two policies: sites may absorb attack traffic, containing the damage but reducing service to some users, or they may withdraw routes to shift both good and bad traffic to other sites. We study how these deployments policies result in different levels of service to different users. We also show evidence of collateral damage on other services located near the attacks.

This technical report is joint work of  Giovane C. M. Moura, Moritz Müller, Cristian Hesselman(SIDN Labs), Ricardo de O. Schmidt, Wouter B. de Vries (U. Twente), John Heidemann, Lan Wei (USC/ISI). Datasets in this paper are derived from RIPE Atlas and are available at http://traces.simpleweb.org/ and at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/.