Categories
Announcements Outages

new website for browsing Internet outages

We are happy to announce a new website at https://ant.isi.edu/outage/world/ that supports our Internet outage data collected from Trinocular.

The ANT Outage world browser, showing Hurricane Irma just after landfall in Florida in Sept. 2017.

Our website supports browsing more than two years of outage data, organized by geography and time.  The map is a google-maps-style world map, with circle on it at even intervals (every 0.5 to 2 degrees of latitude and longitude, depending on the zoom level).  Circle sizes show how many /24 network blocks are out in that location, while circle colors show the percentage of outages, from blue (only a few percent) to red (approaching 100%).

We hope that this website makes our outage data more accessible to researchers and the public.

The raw data underlying this website is available on request, see our outage dataset webpage.

The research is funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cyber Security Division (through the LACREND and Retro-Future Bridge and Outages projects) and Michael Keston, a real estate entrepreneur and philanthropist (through the Michael Keston Endowment).  Michael Keston helped support this the initial version of this website, and DHS has supported our outage data collection and algorithm development.

The website was developed by Dominik Staros, ISI web developer and owner of Imagine Web Consulting, based on data collected by ISI researcher Yuri Pradkin. It builds on prior work by Pradkin, Heidemann and USC’s Lin Quan in ISI’s Analysis of Network Traffic Lab.

ISI has featured our new website on the ISI news page.

 

Categories
Announcements Projects

new project LACANIC

We are happy to announce a new project, LACANIC, the Los Angeles/Colorado Application and Network Information Community.

The LACANIC project’s goal is to develop datasets to improve Internet security and readability. We distribute these datasets through the DHS IMPACT program.

As part of this work we:

  • provide regular data collection to collect long-term, longitudinal data
  • curate datasets for special events
  • build websites and portals to help make data accessible to casual users
  • develop new measurement approaches

We provide several types of datasets:

  • anonymized packet headers and network flow data, often to document events like distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and regular traffic
  • Internet censuses and surveys for IPv4 to document address usage
  • Internet hitlists and histories, derived from IPv4 censuses, to support other topology studies
  • application data, like DNS and Internet-of-Things mapping, to document regular traffic and DDoS events
  • and we are developing other datasets

LACANIC allows us to continue some of the data collection we were doing as part of the LACREND project, as well as develop new methods and ways of sharing the data.

LACANIC is a joint effort of the ANT Lab involving USC/ISI (PI: John Heidemann) and Colorado State University (PI: Christos Papadopoulos).

We thank DHS’s Cyber Security Division for their continued support!

 

Categories
Publications Technical Report

new technical report “Poster: Lightweight Content-based Phishing Detection”

We released a new technical report “Poster: Lightweight Content-based Phishing Detection”, ISI-TR-698, available at http://www.isi.edu/publications/trpublic/files/tr-698.pdf.

The poster abstract and poster (included as part of the technical report) appeared at the poster session at the 36th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in May 2015 in San Jose, CA, USA.

We have released an alpha version of our extension and source code here: http://www.isi.edu/ant/software/phish/.
We would greatly appreciate any help and feedback in testing our plugin!

From the abstract:

blah
Our browser extension hashes the content of a visited page and compares the hashes with a set of known good hashes. If the number of matches exceeds a threshold, the website is suspected as phish and an alert is displayed to the user.

Increasing use of Internet banking and shopping by a broad spectrum of users results in greater potential profits from phishing attacks via websites that masquerade as legitimate sites to trick users into sharing passwords or financial information. Most browsers today detect potential phishing with URL blacklists; while effective at stopping previously known threats, blacklists must react to new threats as they are discovered, leaving users vulnerable for a period of time. Alternatively, whitelists can be used to identify “known-good” websites so that off-list sites (to include possible phish) can never be accessed, but are too limited for many users. Our goal is proactive detection of phishing websites with neither the delay of blacklist identification nor the strict constraints of whitelists. Our approach is to list known phishing targets, index the content at their correct sites, and then look for this content to appear at incorrect sites. Our insight is that cryptographic hashing of page contents allows for efficient bulk identification of content reuse at phishing sites. Our contribution is a system to detect phish by comparing hashes of visited websites to the hashes of the original, known good, legitimate website. We implement our approach as a browser extension in Google Chrome and show that our algorithms detect a majority of phish, even with minimal countermeasures to page obfuscation. A small number of alpha users have been using the extension without issues for several weeks, and we will be releasing our extension and source code upon publication.

Categories
Presentations

New Video About Address Utilization and Allocations on Map Browser

The ANT project released a video describing Internet address allocation and how we study address utilization with IPv4 censuses. Aniruddh Rao prepared this video, working with John Heidemann and Xue Cai.

a scene from the ANT video describing address allocation and census taking

We have also updated our web-based IPv4 address browser to provide information about to what organizations each address block is allocated. The map now visualizes the whois allocation data; we thank the five regional internet registries for sharing this data with us and authorizing this visualization.

organizations in our Internet map

Finally, our web-based IPv4 address browser now has better time travel, with nearly 30 different census from Dec. 2005 to Nov. 2010, and we continue to update the map regularly.

Data collection for this work is through the LANDER project, and the map browser improvements are due to AMITE, both supported by DHS. Video preparation was supported by these projects and NSF through the MADCAT project.

Categories
Papers Publications

new conference paper “Towards an AS-to-Organization Map” to appear at IMC

The paper “Towards an AS-to-Organization Map” was accepted by IMC’10 in Melbourne, Australia (available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Cai10c.html).

From the abstract:

An understanding of Internet topology is central to answer various questions ranging from network resilience to peer selection or data center location. While much of prior work has examined AS-level connectivity, meaningful and relevant results from such an abstract view of Internet topology have been limited. For one, semantically, AS relationships capture business relationships and not physical connectivity. Additionally, many organizations often use multiple ASes, either to implement different routing policies, or as legacies from mergers and acquisitions. In this paper, we move beyond the traditional AS graph view of the Internet to define the problem of AS-to-organization mapping. We describe our initial steps at automating the capture of the rich semantics inherent in the AS-level ecosystem where routing and connectivity intersect with organizations. We discuss preliminary methods that identify multi-AS organizations from WHOIS data and illustrate the challenges posed by the quality of the available data and the complexity of real-world organizational relationships.

Citation: Xue Cai, John Heidemann, Balachander Krishnamurthy, and Walter Willinger. Towards an AS-to-Organization Map. In Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference, p. to appear. Melbourne, Australia, ACM. November, 2010.

Categories
Announcements

multiple views in browsable Internet address map

We’re happy to announce an update to our browsable Internet map at http://www.isi.edu/ant/address/browse/. Our map now includes FIND ME and MULTIPLE VIEWS.

screenshot of browsing RTTs in the Internet
screenshot of browsing RTTs in the Internet

FIND ME: To locate any host on the map, click in the IP address address box (at the top right) and type in a hostname. A pushpin will appear at that address, with a bubble indicating the hostname and IP address, and the map will scroll to the location. No more manually finding addresses!

MULTIPLE VIEWS allow users to flip between different data types, census dates, source locations:

  1. DATA TYPES: We now plot round-trip times in addition to prior ping responsiveness. See how far away the Internet is! (At least from our probing sites.)
  2. CENSUS DATES: We currently plot five datasets from Nov 2006 to June 2009. Travel through time to see the Internet of yesteryear!
  3. SOURCE LOCATIONS: We collect data from two different locations: Los Angeles and Colorado State University, to help understand if we have observation bias. See the Internet from sea level, or a mile high!

To select different views, click the +-sign on the right of the screen and pick from the menus.

Data collection for this work is through the LANDER project http://www.isi.edu/ant/lander/, and the visualization improvements are due to AMITE http://www.isi.edu/ant/amite/, both supported by DHS.  We thank OpenLayers.org for the customizable front-end.