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new journal paper “Plumb: Efficient Stream Processing of Multi-User Pipelines” in the Journal of Software: Practice and Experience

We have published a new journal paper “Plumb: Efficient Stream Processing of Multi-User Pipelines” in Wiley’s Journal of Software: Practice and Experience, available at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/spe.2909

Plumb provides a new pipeline-graph abstraction that allows multiple users to specify workflows in which Plumb can detect and elimiate duplicate processing and handle processing skew due to unbalanced data or stages. The end result is that users get their results faster and a shared cluster is efficiently utilized.

From the abstract of our journal paper:

Operational services run 24×7 and require analytics pipelines to evaluate performance. In mature services such as DNS, these pipelines often grow to many stages developed by multiple, loosely-coupled teams. Such pipelines pose two problems: first, computation and data storage may be duplicated across components developed by different groups, wasting resources. Second, processing can be skewed, with structural skew occurring when different pipeline stages need different amounts of resources, and computational skew occurring when a block of input data requires increased resources. Duplication and structural skew both decrease efficiency, increasing cost, latency, or both. Computational skew can cause pipeline failure or deadlock when resource consumption balloons; we have seen cases where pessimal traffic increases CPU requirements 6-fold. Detecting duplication is challenging when components from multiple teams evolve independently and require fault isolation. Skew management is hard due to dynamic workloads coupled with the conflicting goals of both minimizing latency and maximizing utilization. We propose Plumb, a framework to abstract stream processing as large-block streaming (LBS) for a multi-stage, multi-user workflow. Plumb users express analytics as a DAG of processing modules, allowing Plumb to integrate and optimize workflows from multiple users. Many real-world applications map to the LBS abstraction. Plumb detects and eliminates duplicate computation and storage, and it detects and addresses both structural and computational skew by tracking computation across the pipeline. We exercise Plumb using the analytics pipeline for B-Root DNS. We compare Plumb to a hand-tuned system, cutting latency to one-third the original, and requiring 39% fewer container hours, while supporting more flexible, multi-user analytics and providing greater robustness to DDoS-driven demands.

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

Plumb is open source software and we will be interested in beta testers. Please contact us if you think it would be useful to manage your workflows over one or a cluster of computers.

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Papers Publications

new journal paper “Detecting IoT Devices in the Internet” in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

We have published a new journal paper “Detecting IoT Devices in the Internet” in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, available at https://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Guo20c.pdf

Figure 5 from [Guo20c] showing per-device-type AS penetrations from 2013 to 2018 for 16 of the 23 device types we studies (omitting 7 device types appearing in less than10 ASes)

From the abstract of our journal paper:

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks launched from compromised Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices have shown how vulnerable the Internet is to largescale DDoS attacks. To understand the risks of these attacks requires learning about these IoT devices: where are they? how many are there? how are they changing? This paper describes three new methods to find IoT devices on the Internet: server IP addresses in traffic, server names in DNS queries, and manufacturer information in TLS certificates. Our primary methods (IP addresses and DNS names) use knowledge of servers run by the manufacturers of these devices. Our third method uses TLS certificates obtained by active scanning. We have applied our algorithms to a number of observations. With our IP-based algorithm, we report detections from a university campus over 4 months and from traffic transiting an IXP over 10 days. We apply our DNS-based algorithm to traffic from 8 root DNS servers from 2013 to 2018 to study AS-level IoT deployment. We find substantial growth (about 3.5×) in AS penetration for 23 types of IoT devices and modest increase in device type density for ASes detected with these device types (at most 2 device types in 80% of these ASes in 2018). DNS also shows substantial growth in IoT deployment in residential households from 2013 to 2017. Our certificate-based algorithm finds 254k IP cameras and network video recorders from 199 countries around the world.

We make operational traffic we captured from 10 IoT devices we own public at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/iot/. We also use operational traffic of 21 IoT devices shared by University of New South Wales at http://149.171.189.1/.

This journal paper is joint work of Hang Guo and  John Heidemann from USC/ISI.

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New journal paper “Parametric Methods for Anomaly Detection in Aggregate Traffic” to appear in TON

The paper “Parametric Methods for Anomaly Detection in Aggregate Traffic” was accepted for publication in ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking (available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Thatte10a.html).

From the abstract:

This paper develops parametric methods to detect network anomalies using only aggregate traffic statistics, in contrast to other works requiring flow separation, even when the anomaly is a small fraction of the total traffic. By adopting simple statistical models for anomalous and background traffic in the time-domain, one can estimate model parameters in realtime, thus obviating the need for a long training phase or manual parameter tuning. The proposed bivariate Parametric Detection Mechanism (bPDM) uses a sequential probability ratio test, allowing for control over the false positive rate while examining the trade-off between detection time and the strength of an anomaly. Additionally, it uses both traffic-rate and packet-size statistics, yielding a bivariate model that eliminates most false positives. The method is analyzed using the bitrate SNR metric, which is shown to be an effective metric for anomaly detection. The performance of the bPDM is evaluated in three ways: first, synthetically-generated traffic provides for a controlled comparison of detection time as a function of the anomalous level of traffic. Second, the approach is shown to be able to detect controlled artificial attacks over the USC campus network in varying real traffic mixes. Third, the proposed algorithm achieves rapid detection of real denial-of-service attacks as determined by the replay of previously captured network traces. The method developed in this paper is able to detect all attacks in these scenarios in a few seconds or less.

Citation: Gautam Thatte, Urbashi Mitra, and John Heidemann. Parametric Methods for Anomaly Detection in Aggregate Traffic. ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking, p. accepted to appear, August, 2010. (Likely publication in 2011). <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Thatte10a.html>.