Internet Measurements at USC/ISI and University of Memphis

Our work is part of a research project supported by the US Department of Homeland Security, evaluating potential technology that may support work done at the US FCC. As a part of .gov, we encourage you consider the potential for our measurements to support the U.S.’s need to evaluate the reliability of the Internet. (You may contact our program manager, Ann Cox ann.cox@hq.dhs.gov if you wish to verify our involvement as a DHS S&T research program, or Rasoul Safavian rasoul.safavian@fcc.gov for FCC’s interests in this potential.

To conduct this research, several machines at different sites around the world send pings (ICMP echo request messages) to hosts and routers. These probes are very low rate—at most once every 11 minutes per address, but more often as low as once every few days per sub-network. We apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused you. We probe billions of IP addresses and obtaining prior consent is impossible. We strive to keep our data collection to the lowest rate possible so as to not interfere with active networks.

Our messages are NOT attack traffic–we minimize how much traffic we send, and our pings can do no harm. (If your firewall or router reported us as causing a “ping of death” (PoD) attack, please be assured we do NOT send malformed or over-long pings. Although PoD was a problem 1995-2000, no modern OS is affected by them. We believe some routers (such as Belkin routers) mis-classify our pings as this ancient attack.)

Project Description

The goal of this research is to better understand Internet topology, determine liveness, link delays, and assess outages. We hope that this work will improve our understanding of Internet topology, robustness, and security. If you would like more information about our research, a summary of the project is at https://ant.isi.edu/ or see our video at: https://ant.isi.edu/address/video/index.html

and you may browse our maps at https://address.ant.isi.edu

Detailed technical papers about the work are at https://ant.isi.edu/papers/ with the papers “Trinocular: Understanding Internet Reliability Through Adaptive Probing” (http://ant.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Quan13c.pdf) describing our method and why it is low-rate, and “Evaluating Externally Visible Outages” (http://ant.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Alwabel15a.pdf) evaluting our work compared to existing FCC measurement systems.

We go to great lengths to keep our probing traffic rates low. In most cases a target network of 256 adjacent addresses (like 192.0.2.*) will see, on average, only 19 64-byte probes per hour. At this rate our traffic over an entire day is less than a single query to Google on “census” followed by going to the Census Bureau’s front page.

Opt-out Information

We maintain an opt-out list and do not probe those addresses.

Before opting out, please note that experimental data is most useful when it covers as much of the Internet as possible. Thus, we respectfully request that you allow us include your network in our study. Rest assured that this is a purely research project and it will never pose a security threat to your network.

If you still want to opt-out of this project, please do the following:

Determine the network block you want us to exclude. This can be in one of two formats: a. a prefix (e.g., 192.0.2/24) or b. a range (e.g., 192.0.2.0 - 192.0.2.127)
Please indicate if this network block is for your direct use, or for use by your customers. If the addresses are not for your direct use, please indicate why you are authorized to stop traffic to traffic to others.
E-mail this information to ant-research-operators@isi.edu

We need to know your *public-facing* IP addresses. We do not probe private IPv4 addresses (10/8, 172.16/12, and 192.168/16, as specified by RFC-1918). If you received probes on these addresses then you likely have a Network Address Translator (NAT) with a public IP address. We need that public address (not the private addresses) to put on our opt-out list.

Note: for your convenience, your IP address while accessing this site is:

Please allow at least one business day for your addresses to be added to the exclude list and for probing to cease.

Opt-in Information

If you wish to “opt-in” and whitelist our probing machines to access your sites, please contact us and we can provide you the information you will need.

Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.

Thank you,

The ANT project team (https://ant.isi.edu) at USC/ISI and University of Memphis, with hosting help from Keio University/WIDE, Athens University of Economics and Business, and Colorado State University