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
Tarang Saluja completed his summer undergraduate research internship at ISI this summer, working with John Heidemann and Yuri Pradkin on his project “Differences in Monitoring the DNS Root Over IPv4 and IPv6″.
In his project, Tarang examined RIPE Atlas’s DNSmon, a measurement system that monitors the Root Server System. DNSmon examines both IPv4 and IPv6, and its IPv6 reports show query loss rates that are consistently higher than IPv4, often 4-6% IPv6 loss vs. no or 2% IPv4 loss. Prior results by researchers at RIPE suggested these differences were due to problems at specific Atlas Vantage Points (VPs, also called Atlas Probes).
Tarang Saluja describing his research to an ISI researcher, at the ISI REU Poster Session on 2022-08-01.
Building on the Guillero Baltra’s studies of partial connectivity in the Internet, Tarang classified Atlas VPs with problems as islands and peninsulas. Islands think they are on IPv6, but cannot reach any of the 13 Root DNS “letters” over IPv6, indicating that the VP has a local network configuration problem. Peninsulas can reach some letters, but not others, indicating a routing problem somewhere in the core of the Internet.
Tarang’s work is important because these observations allow lead to potential solutions. Islands suggest VPs that do not support IPv6 and so should not be used for monitoring. Peninsulas point to IPv6 routing problems that need to be addressed by ISPs. Setting VPs with these problems aside provides a more accurate view of what IPv6 should be, and allows us to use DNSmon to detect more subtle problems. Together, his work points the way to improving IPv6 for everyone and improving Root DNS access over IPv6.
Tarang’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.
Erica Stutz completed her summer undergraduate research internship at ISI this summer, working with John Heidemann, Yuri Pradkin, and Xiao Song on her project “Visualizing COVID-19 Work-from-Home”.
In this project, Erica developed a new Covid-19 Work-From-Home website combinng Xiao WFH data with our existing outage website, and adding new interactive drill-down methods to display additional information to the user.
Visulizing Covid-19 work-from-home: here we look at China, Korea, and Japan and pop-up information about Laiwu, China. The popup shows WFH behavior for that location for the first 6 months of 2020.
We hope Erica’s new website makes it easier to evaluate COVID-19 WFH changes, and we look forward to continue to work with Erica on this topic.
Erica worked virtually at USC/ISI in summer 2021 as part of the (ISI Research Experiences for Undergraduates. We thank Jelena Mirkovic (PI) for coordinating the second year of this great program, and NSF for support through award #2051101.
[Bogutz19a, figure 1]: Our sideboard showing important outages on 2019-03-08, including this outage in Venezuela.
Today, outage detection systems can track outages across the whole IPv4 Internet—millions of networks. However, it becomes difficult to find meaningful, interesting events in this huge dataset, since three months of data can easily include 660M observations and thousands of outage events. We propose an outage reporting system that sifts through this data to find the most interesting events. We explore multiple metrics to evaluate interesting”, reflecting the size and severity of outages. We show that defining interest as the product of size by severity works well, avoiding degenerate cases like complete outages affecting a few people, and apparently large outages that affect only a small fraction of people in an area. We have integrated outage reporting into our existing public website (https://outage.ant.isi.edu) with the goal of making near-real-time outage information accessible to the general public. Such data can help answer questions like “what are the most significant outages today?”, did Florida have major problems in an ongoing hurricane?”, and “are there power outages in Venezuela?”.
The data from this paper is available publicly and in our website. The technical report ISI-TR-735 includes some additional data.
Ryan Bogutz completed his summer undergraduate research internship at ISI this summer, working with John Heidemann and Yuri Pradkin on his project “Identifying Interesting Outages”.
Ryan Bogutz with his poster at the ISI summer undergraduate research poster session.
In this project, Ryan examined Internet Outage data from Trinocular, developing an outage report that summarized the most “interesting” outages each day. Yuri integrated this report into our outage website where is available as a left side panel.
We hope Ryan’s new report makes it easier to evaluate Internet outages on a given day, and we look forward to continue to work with Ryan on this topic.
Ryan visited USC/ISI in summer 2019 as part of the (ISI Research Experiences for Undergraduates. We thank Jelena Mirkovic (PI) for coordinating the second year of this great program, and NSF for support through award #1659886.
Yuri Pradkin, Christopher Morales Ramos, and John Heidemann, with Christopher’s summer undergraduate research project poster.
Christopher’s project was improving the accuracy in estimating Round Trip Time (RTT) measurements from icmptrain our high-speed IPv4 prober, while minimizing the amount of traffic that was sent. In addition to improving RTT estimates, his work can lead to better geolocation estimates.
His research at ISI was jointly advised by Yuri Pradkin and John Heidemann, as part of the ISI REU program directed by Jelena Mirkovic.
