Sandeep Muthu completed his summer undergraduate research internship at ISI this summer, working with John Heidemann and Yuri Pradkin on his project “Determining the Risks of Tunnels Over the Internet”.
In his project, Sandeep examined how unauthenticated tunneling protocols can be infiltrated, and how often they are used in the Internet. He demonstrated that tunnels can be exploited in the DETER testbed, and showed that there are many tunnels in general use based on analysis of anonymized IXP data.
Sandeep Muthu sharing his poster at the ISI undergraduate research poster session in July 2023.
Sandeep’s work was part of the ISI Research Experiences for Undergraduates program at USC/ISI. We thank Jelena Mirkovic (PI) for coordinating another year of this great program, and NSF for support through award #2051101. We also thank the University of Memphis (Christos Papadopoulos) and FIU
The paper “Do You See Me Now? Sparsity in Passive Observations of Address Liveness” will appear in the 2017 Conference on Network Traffic Measurement and Analyais (TMA) July 21-23, 2017 in Dublin, Ireland. The datasets from the paper that we can make public will be at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/sparsity/.
Visibility of addresses and blocks from possible /24 virtual monitors (Figure 2 from [Mirkovic17a])From the abstract of the paper:
Accurate information about address and block usage in the Internet has many applications in planning address allocation, topology studies, and simulations. Prior studies used active probing, sometimes augmented with passive observation, to study macroscopic phenomena, such as the overall usage of the IPv4 address space. This paper instead studies the completeness of passive sources: how well they can observe microscopic phenomena such as address usage within a given network. We define sparsity as the limitation of a given monitor to see a target, and we quantify the effects of interest, temporal, and coverage sparsity. To study sparsity, we introduce inverted analysis, a novel approach that uses complete passive observations of a few end networks (three campus networks in our case) to infer what of these networks would be seen by millions of virtual monitors near their traffic’s destinations. Unsurprisingly, we find that monitors near popular content see many more targets and that visibility is strongly influenced by bipartite traffic between clients and servers. We are the first to quantify these effects and show their implications for the study of Internet liveness from passive observations. We find that visibility is heavy-tailed, with only 0.5% monitors seeing more than 10\% of our targets’ addresses, and is most affected by interest sparsity over temporal and coverage sparsity. Visibility is also strongly bipartite. Monitors of a different class than a target (e.g., a server monitor observing a client target) outperform monitors of the same class as a target in 82-99% of cases in our datasets. Finally, we find that adding active probing to passive observations greatly improves visibility of both server and client target addresses, but is not critical for visibility of target blocks. Our findings are valuable to understand limitations of existing measurement studies, and to develop methods to maximize microscopic completeness in future studies.
We have released a new technical report “Do You See Me Now? Sparsity in Passive Observations of Address Liveness (extended)”, ISI-TR-2016-710, available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Mirkovic16a.pdf
How many USC addresses are visible from virtual remote monitors, based on the monitor’s overall visibility.
From the abstract:
Full allocation of IPv4 addresses has prompted interest in measuring address liveness, first with active probing, and recently with the addition of passive observation. While prior work has shown dramatic increases in coverage, this paper explores what factors affect contributions of passive observers to visibility. While all passive monitors are sparse, seeing only a part of the Internet, we seek to understand how different types of sparsity impact observation quality: the interests of external hosts and the hosts within the observed network, the temporal limitations on the observation duration, and coverage challenges to observe all traffic for a given target or a given vantage point. We study sparsity with inverted analysis, a new approach where we use passive monitors at four sites to infer what monitors would see at all sites exchanging traffic with those four. We show that visibility provided by monitors is heavy-tailed—interest sparsity means popular monitors see a great deal, while 99% see very little. We find that traffic is bipartite, with visibility much stronger between client-networks and server-networks than within each group. Finally, we find that popular monitors are robust to temporal and coverage sparsity, but they greatly reduce power of monitors that start with low visibility.
This technical report is joint work of Jelena Mirkovic, Genevieve Bartlett, John Heidemann, Hao Shi, and Xiyue Deng, all of USC/ISI.
We’ve been taking Internet IPv4 censuses regularly since 2006. In each census, we probe the entire allocated IPv4 address space. You may browse 8 years of data at our IPv4 address browser.
A still image from our animation of 8 years of IPv4 censuses.
These eight years show some interesting events, from an early “open” Internet in 2006, to full allocation of IPv4 by ICANN in 2011, to higher utilization in 2014.
This animation was first shown at the Dec. 2014 DHS Cyber Security Division R&D Showcase and Technical Workshop as part of the talk “Towards Understanding Internet Reliability” given by John Heidemann. This work was supported by DHS, most recently through the LACREND project.
