Tag: Internet Measurement Conference

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Papers Publications

new conference paper “Cache Me If You Can: Effects of DNS Time-to-Live” at ACM IMC 2019

We will publish a new paper “Cache Me If You Can: Effects of DNS Time-to-Live” by Giovane C. M. Moura, John Heidemann, Ricardo de O. Schmidt, and Wes Hardaker, in the ACM Internet Measurements Conference (IMC 2019) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

From the abstract:

Figure 10a from [Moura19b], showing the distribution of latency with small TTLs before (right in blue) and with larger TTLs after (left in red) the .uy domain reviewed our work and lengthened their domain’s cache lifetimes to reduce latency to their customers.

DNS depends on extensive caching for good performance, and every DNS zone owner must set Time-to-Live (TTL) values to control their DNS caching. Today there is relatively little guidance backed by research about how to set TTLs, and operators must balance conflicting demands of caching against agility of configuration. Exactly how TTL value choices affect operational networks is quite challenging to understand due to interactions across the distributed DNS service, where resolvers receive TTLs in different ways (answers and hints), TTLs are specified in multiple places (zones and their parent’s glue), and while DNS resolution must be security-aware. This paper provides the first careful evaluation of how these multiple, interacting factors affect the effective cache lifetimes of DNS records, and provides recommendations for how to configure DNS TTLs based on our findings. We provide recommendations in TTL choice for different situations, and for where they must be configured. We show that longer TTLs have significant promise in reducing latency, reducing it from 183ms to 28.7ms for one country-code TLD.

We have also reported on this work at the RIPE and APNIC blogs.

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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.

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Papers Publications

new conference paper “Who Knocks at the IPv6 Door? Detecting IPv6 Scanning” at ACM IMC 2018

We have published a new paper “Who Knocks at the IPv6 Door? Detecting IPv6 Scanning” by Kensuke Fukuda and John Heidemann, in the ACM Internet Measurements Conference (IMC 2018) in Boston, Mass., USA.

DNS backscatter from IPv4 and IPv6 ([Fukuda18a], figure 1).
From the abstract:

DNS backscatter detects internet-wide activity by looking for common reverse DNS lookups at authoritative DNS servers that are high in the DNS hierarchy. Both DNS backscatter and monitoring unused address space (darknets or network telescopes) can detect scanning in IPv4, but with IPv6’s vastly larger address space, darknets become much less effective. This paper shows how to adapt DNS backscatter to IPv6. IPv6 requires new classification rules, but these reveal large network services, from cloud providers and CDNs to specific services such as NTP and mail. DNS backscatter also identifies router interfaces suggesting traceroute-based topology studies. We identify 16 scanners per week from DNS backscatter using observations from the B-root DNS server, with confirmation from backbone traffic observations or blacklists. After eliminating benign services, we classify another 95 originators in DNS backscatter as potential abuse. Our work also confirms that IPv6 appears to be less carefully monitored than IPv4.

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Papers Publications

new conference paper “LDplayer: DNS Experimentation at Scale” at ACM IMC 2018

We have published a new paper LDplayer: DNS Experimentation at Scale by Liang Zhu and John Heidemann, in the ACM Internet Measurements Conference (IMC 2018) in Boston, Mass., USA.

Figure 14a: Evaluation of server memory with different TCP timeouts and minimal RTT (<1 ms). Trace: B-Root-17a. Protocol: TLS

From the abstract:

DNS has evolved over the last 20 years, improving in security and privacy and broadening the kinds of applications it supports. However, this evolution has been slowed by the large installed base and the wide range of implementations. The impact of changes is difficult to model due to complex interactions between DNS optimizations, caching, and distributed operation. We suggest that experimentation at scale is needed to evaluate changes and facilitate DNS evolution. This paper presents LDplayer, a configurable, general-purpose DNS experimental framework that enables DNS experiments to scale in several dimensions: many zones, multiple levels of DNS hierarchy, high query rates, and diverse query sources. LDplayer provides high fidelity experiments while meeting these requirements through its distributed DNS query replay system, methods to rebuild the relevant DNS hierarchy from traces, and efficient emulation of this hierarchy on minimal hardware. We show that a single DNS server can correctly emulate multiple independent levels of the DNS hierarchy while providing correct responses as if they were independent. We validate that our system can replay a DNS root traffic with tiny error (± 8 ms quartiles in query timing and ± 0.1% difference in query rate). We show that our system can replay queries at 87k queries/s while using only one CPU, more than twice of a normal DNS Root traffic rate. LDplayer’s trace replay has the unique ability to evaluate important design questions with confidence that we capture the interplay of caching, timeouts, and resource constraints. As an example, we demonstrate the memory requirements of a DNS root server with all traffic running over TCP and TLS, and identify performance discontinuities in latency as a function of client RTT.

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DNS Papers Publications

new conference paper “When the Dike Breaks: Dissecting DNS Defenses During DDoS” at ACM IMC 2018

We have published a new paper “When the Dike Breaks: Dissecting DNS Defenses During DDoS” in the ACM Internet Measurements Conference (IMC 2018) in Boston, Mass., USA.

From the abstract:

Caching and retries protect half of clients even with 90% loss and an attack twice the cache duration. (Figure 7c from [Moura18b].)

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 relatively simple, the \emph{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 \emph{user experience}, and server-side traffic. We find that, for about 30\% of clients, caching is not effective. However, when caches are full they allow about half of clients to ride out server outages that last less than cache lifetimes, Caching and retries together allow up to half of the clients to tolerate DDoS attacks longer than cache lifetimes, with 90\% query loss, and almost all clients to tolerate attacks resulting in 50\% packet loss. While clients may get service during an attack, tail-latency increases for clients. For servers, retries during DDoS attacks increase normal traffic up to $8\times$. Our findings about caching and retries help explain why users see service outages from some real-world DDoS events, but minimal visible effects from others.

Datasets from this paper are available at no cost and are listed at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/dns/#Moura18b_data.

 

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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.

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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.

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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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Papers Publications

new conference paper “Detecting Malicious Activity with DNS Backscatter”

The paper “Detecting Malicious Activity with DNS Backscatter” will appear at the ACM Internet Measurements Conference in October 2015 in Tokyo, Japan.  A copy is available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Fukuda15a.pdf).

How newtork activity generates DNS backscatter that is visible at authority servers. (Figure 1 from [Fukuda15a]).
How newtork activity generates DNS backscatter that is visible at authority servers. (Figure 1 from [Fukuda15a]).
From the abstract:

Network-wide activity is when one computer (the originator) touches many others (the targets). Motives for activity may be benign (mailing lists, CDNs, and research scanning), malicious (spammers and scanners for security vulnerabilities), or perhaps indeterminate (ad trackers). Knowledge of malicious activity may help anticipate attacks, and understanding benign activity may set a baseline or characterize growth. This paper identifies DNS backscatter as a new source of information about network-wide activity. Backscatter is the reverse DNS queries caused when targets or middleboxes automatically look up the domain name of the originator. Queries are visible to the authoritative DNS servers that handle reverse DNS. While the fraction of backscatter they see depends on the server’s location in the DNS hierarchy, we show that activity that touches many targets appear even in sampled observations. We use information about the queriers to classify originator activity using machine-learning. Our algorithm has reasonable precision (70-80%) as shown by data from three different organizations operating DNS servers at the root or country-level. Using this technique we examine nine months of activity from one authority to identify trends in scanning, identifying bursts corresponding to Heartbleed and broad and continuous scanning of ssh.

The work in this paper is by Kensuke Fukuda (NII/Sokendai) and John Heidemann (USC/ISI) and was begun when Fukuda-san was a visiting scholar at USC/ISI.  Kensuke Fukuda’s work in this paper is partially funded by Young Researcher Overseas Visit Program by Sokendai, JSPS Kakenhi, and the Strategic International Collaborative R&D Promotion Project of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication in Japan, and by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme.  John Heidemann’s work is partially supported by US DHS S&T, Cyber Security division.

Some of the datasets in this paper are available to researchers, either from the authors or through DNS-OARC.  We list DNS backscatter datasets and methods to obtain them at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/dns_backscatter/index.html.

 

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Papers Publications

new conference paper “When the Internet Sleeps: Correlating Diurnal Networks With External Factors” in IMC 2014

The paper “When the Internet Sleeps: Correlating Diurnal Networks With External Factors” will appear at ACM Internet Measurements Conference 2014 in Vancouver, Canada (available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Quan14c/ with cite and pdf, or direct pdf).

Predicting longitude from observed diurnal phase ([Quan14c], figure 14c)
Predicting longitude from observed diurnal phase for 287k geolocatable, diurnal blocks ([Quan14c], figure 14c)
From the abstract:

As the Internet matures, policy questions loom larger in its operation. When should an ISP, city, or government invest in infrastructure? How do their policies affect use? In this work, we develop a new approach to evaluate how policies, economic conditions and technology correlates with Internet use around the world. First, we develop an adaptive and accurate approach to estimate block availability, the fraction of active IP addresses in each /24 block over short timescales (every 11 minutes). Our estimator provides a new lens to interpret data taken from existing long-term outage measurements, thus requiring no additional traffic. (If new collection was required, it would be lightweight, since on average, outage detection requires less than 20 probes per hour per /24 block; less than 1% of background radiation.) Second, we show that spectral analysis of this measure can identify diurnal usage: blocks where addresses are regularly used during part of the day and idle in other times. Finally, we analyze data for the entire responsive Internet (3.7M /24 blocks) over 35 days. These global observations show when and where the Internet sleeps—networks are mostly always-on in the US and Western Europe, and diurnal in much of Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe. ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) testing shows that diurnal networks correlate negatively with country GDP and electrical consumption, quantifying that national policies and economics relate to networks.

Citation: Lin Quan, John Heidemann, and Yuri Pradkin. When the Internet Sleeps: Correlating Diurnal Networks With External Factors. In Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference, p. to appear. Vancouver, BC, Canada, ACM. November, 2014.

All data in this paper is available to researchers at no cost, and source code to our analysis tools is available on request; see our diurnal datasets webpage.

This work is partly supported by DHS S&T, Cyber Security division, agreement FA8750-12-2-0344 (under AFRL) and N66001-13-C-3001 (under SPAWAR).  The views contained
herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of DHS or the U.S. Government.  This work was classified by USC’s IRB as non-human subjects research (IIR00001648).