Archive for the 'Future' Category

CAIDA’s 2022 Annual Report

Monday, July 10th, 2023 by kc

The CAIDA annual report summarizes CAIDA’s activities for 2022 in the areas of research, infrastructure, data collection and analysis. The executive summary is excerpted below:
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CAIDA Resource Catalog

Tuesday, October 27th, 2020 by Bradley Huffaker

One of CAIDA’s primary missions has been to improve our understanding of the Internet infrastructure, through data-driven science. To this end, CAIDA has collected and maintains one of the largest collections of Internet-related data sets in the world, and developed tools and services to curate and process that data. Along with this success has come the challenge of helping new students and researchers to find and use that rich archive of resources.

As part of our NSF-funded DIBBS project, CAIDA has developed a rich context resource catalog, served at catalog.caida.org. The goal of the catalog is to help both newcomers and experienced users with data discovery, and reducing the time between finding the data and extracting knowledge and insights from it.

In addition to linking datasets to related papers and presentations, the catalog will also link to code snippets, user-provided notes, and recipes for performing commons analytical tasks with the data.

The catalog can be found at: https://catalog.caida.org

Please explore and provide feedback!

CAIDA’s Annual Report for 2018

Tuesday, May 7th, 2019 by kc

The CAIDA annual report summarizes CAIDA’s activities for 2018, in the areas of research, infrastructure, data collection and analysis. Our research projects span Internet topology, routing, security, economics, future Internet architectures, and policy. Our infrastructure, software development, and data sharing activities support measurement-based internet research, both at CAIDA and around the world, with focus on the health and integrity of the global Internet ecosystem. The executive summary is excerpted below:
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CAIDA’s Annual Report for 2017

Tuesday, May 29th, 2018 by kc

The CAIDA annual report summarizes CAIDA’s activities for 2017, in the areas of research, infrastructure, data collection and analysis. Our research projects span Internet topology, routing, security, economics, future Internet architectures, and policy. Our infrastructure, software development, and data sharing activities support measurement-based internet research, both at CAIDA and around the world, with focus on the health and integrity of the global Internet ecosystem. The executive summary is excerpted below:
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CAIDA’s 2016 Annual Report

Tuesday, May 9th, 2017 by kc

[Executive summary and link below]

The CAIDA annual report summarizes CAIDA’s activities for 2016, in the areas of research, infrastructure, data collection and analysis. Our research projects span Internet topology, routing, security, economics, future Internet architectures, and policy. Our infrastructure, software development, and data sharing activities support measurement-based internet research, both at CAIDA and around the world, with focus on the health and integrity of the global Internet ecosystem. The executive summary is excerpted below:

Mapping the Internet. We continued to expand our topology mapping capabilities using our Ark measurement infrastructure. We improved the accuracy and sophistication of our topology annotations, including classification of ISPs, business relationships between them, and geographic mapping of interdomain links that implement these relationships. We released two Internet Topology Data Kits (ITDKs) incorporating these advances.

Mapping Interconnection Connectivity and Congestion. We continued our collaboration with MIT to map the rich mesh of interconnection in the Internet in order to study congestion induced by evolving peering and traffic management practices of CDNs and access ISPs. We focused our efforts on the challenge of detecting and localizing congestion to specific points in between networks. We developed new tools to scale measurements to a much wider set of available nodes. We also implemented a new database and graphing platform to allow us to interactively explore our topology and performance measurements. We produced related data collection and analyses to enable evaluation of these measurements in the larger context of the evolving ecosystem: infrastructure resiliency, economic tussles, and public policy.

Monitoring Global Internet Security and Stability. We conducted infrastructure research and development projects that focus on security and stability aspects of the global Internet. We developed continuous fine-grained monitoring capabilities establishing a baseline connectivity awareness against which to interpret observed changes due to network outages or route hijacks. We released (in beta form) a new operational prototype service that monitors the Internet, in near-real-time, and helps identify macroscopic Internet outages affecting the edge of the network.

CAIDA also developed new client tools for measuring IPv4 and IPv6 spoofing capabilities, along with services that provide reporting and allow users to opt-in or out of sharing the data publicly.

Future Internet Architectures. We continued studies of IPv4 and IPv6 paths in the Internet, including topological congruency, stability, and RTT performance. We examined the state of security policies in IPv6 networks, and collaborated to measure CGN deployment in U.S. broadband networks. We also continued our collaboration with researchers at several other universities to advance development of a new Internet architecture: Named Data Networking (NDN) and published a paper on the policy and social implications of an NDN-based Internet.

Public Policy. Acting as an Independent Measurement Expert, we posted our agreed-upon revised methodology for measurement methods and reporting requirements related to AT&T Inc. and DirecTV merger (MB Docket No. 14-90). We published our proposed method and a companion justification document. Inspired by this experience and a range of contradicting claims about interconnection performance, we introduced a new model describing measurements of interconnection links of access providers, and demonstrated how it can guide sound interpretation of interconnection-related measurements regardless of their source.

Infrastructure operations. It was an unprecedented year for CAIDA from an infrastructure development perspective. We continued support for our existing active and passive measurement infrastructure to provide visibility into global Internet behavior, and associated software tools and platforms that facilitate network research and operational assessments.

We made available several data services that have been years in the making: our prototype Internet Outage Detection and Analysis service, with several underlying components released as open source; the Periscope platform to unify and scale querying of thousands of looking glass nodes on the global Internet; our large-scale Internet topology query system (Henya); and our Spoofer system for measurement and analysis of source address validation across the global Internet. Unfortunately, due to continual network upgrades, we lost access to our 10GB backbone traffic monitoring infrastructure. Now we are considering approaches to acquire new monitors capable of packet capture on 100GB links.

As always, we engaged in a variety of tool development, and outreach activities, including maintaining web sites, publishing 13 peer-reviewed papers, 3 technical reports, 4 workshop reports, one (our first) BGP hackathon report, 31 presentations, 20 blog entries, and hosting 6 workshops (including the hackathon). This report summarizes the status of our activities; details about our research are available in papers, presentations, and interactive resources on our web sites. We also provide listings and links to software tools and data sets shared, and statistics reflecting their usage. Finally, we report on web site usage, personnel, and financial information, to provide the public a better idea of what CAIDA is and does.

For the full 2016 annual report, see http://www.caida.org/home/about/annualreports/2016/

Response to RFI for Future Needs for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure to Support Science and Engineering Research

Tuesday, April 18th, 2017 by kc

I sent the following to NSF in response to a recent Request for Information (RFI) for Future Needs for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure to Support Science and Engineering Research. (The format required an abstract and answers to 3 specific questions.)

Abstract

As the Internet and our dependence on it have grown, the structure and dynamics of the network, and how it relates to the political economy in which it is embedded, have gathered increasing attention by researchers, operators and policy makers. All of these stakeholders bring questions that they lack the capability to answer themselves. Epistemological challenges lie in developing and deploying measurement instrumentation and protocols, expertise required to soundly interpret and use complex data, lack of tools to synthesize different sources of data to reveal insights, data management cost and complexity, and privacy issues. Although a few interdisciplinary projects have succeeded, the current mode of collaboration simply does not scale to the exploding interest in scientific study of the Internet, nor to complex and visionary scientific uses of CAIDA’s data by non-networking experts. We believe the community needs a new shared cyberinfrastructure resource that integrates active Internet measurement capabilities, multi-terabyte data archives, live data streams, heavily curated topology data sets revealing coverage and business relationships, and traffic measurements. Such a resource would enable a broad set of researchers to pursure new scientific directions, experiments, and data products that promote valid interpretations of data and derived inferences.

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Fantastic NSF PI meeting for Future Internet Architecture program

Saturday, October 8th, 2016 by kc

I had the honor and pleasure of participating in a fantastic PI meeting last month — the National Science Foundation’s Future Internet Architecture (FIA) research program, 20-21 September 2014. As the formal FIA program winds down, NSF wants to maximize the opportunities for return on its investments into this program by helping connect principal investigators and researchers with other potential applied research and development funding sources. We are all well aware that, at least in the case of the NDN project (in which CAIDA participates), there are still huge open research challenges that will require years to conquer. But there are also tremendous opportunities to apply the ideas (and the code base) at this stage of the project’s evolution.

Much credit goes to John Wroclawski and Craig Partridge, who led the organization of this meeting. They arranged short presentations by seven federal agency representatives who outlined strategic interests of their agencies that were relevant to FIA technologies, and how to effectively engage those agencies: Stu Wagner (DARPA/I2O), Joe Evans (DARPA/STO), Mark Laurri (DARPA/MTO), Rich Carlson (DOE SC-ACSR), Dan Massey (DHS S&T), Kevin Thompson (NSF), and Doug Montgomery (NIST). They each provided a view of what their programs are, guidelines for how to propose ideas to their agency, links to recent funding opportunities, and answers to any questions we had.

This firehose-of-information session was followed by lunch and then breakouts to prepare pitches to friendly external respondents for feedback and discussion. Each respondent brought broad experience with non-NSF government funding across agencies and technical areas. The FIA researchers got some priceless preparation from some of the best and brightest in the federal funding community. The next challenge for FIA PIs is to convince some of them to participate in the next round of investment into FIA research ideas and technologies. Kudos to NSF and to John and Craig for great assistance with this goal.

CRA Congressional visit to Washington D.C.

Tuesday, September 27th, 2016 by kc

As part of a Computing Research Association (CRA) effort to introduce policymakers to the contributions and power of IT research for the nation and the world, this month I had the honor of visiting with the offices of four U.S. senators and a U.S. Representative:

Internet-specific topics I discussed included the importance of scientific measurement infrastructure to support empirical network and security research, broadband policy, and Internet governance.

We left them with a terrific infographic from the National Academy study “Continuing Innovation in Information Technology“, which shows the economic impact of different areas of fundamental IT research. The 2-pager flyer and the whole National Academy report, Depicting Innovation in Information Technology, is available on the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Computer Science Telecommunications Board (CSTB) site.
Continuing Innovation in Information Technology

Even with many folks in Congress having a higher priority of passing a budget and getting back home to their districts to prepare for elections, all the staffers were gracious and genuinely interested in our field. (Who wouldn’t be? 😉 )

Kudos to the Computing Research Association for providing a wonderful opportunity to engage with policy folks.

CAIDA’s 2015 Annual Report

Tuesday, July 19th, 2016 by kc

[Executive summary and link below]

The CAIDA annual report summarizes CAIDA’s activities for 2015, in the areas of research, infrastructure, data collection and analysis. Our research projects span Internet topology, routing, security, economics, future Internet architectures, and policy. Our infrastructure, software development, and data sharing activities support measurement-based internet research, both at CAIDA and around the world, with focus on the health and integrity of the global Internet ecosystem. The executive summary is excerpted below:

Mapping the Internet. We continued to pursue Internet cartography, improving our IPv4 and IPv6 topology mapping capabilities using our expanding and extensible Ark measurement infrastructure. We improved the accuracy and sophistication of our topology annotation capabilities, including classification of ISPs and their business relationships. Using our evolving IP address alias resolution measurement system, we collected curated, and released another Internet Topology Data Kit (ITDK).

Mapping Interconnection Connectivity and Congestion.
We used the Ark infrastructure to support an ambitious collaboration with MIT to map the rich mesh of interconnection in the Internet, with a focus on congestion induced by evolving peering and traffic management practices of CDNs and access ISPs, including methods to detect and localize the congestion to specific points in networks. We undertook several studies to pursue different dimensions of this challenge: identification of interconnection borders from comprehensive measurements of the global Internet topology; identification of the actual physical location (facility) of an interconnection in specific circumstances; and mapping observed evidence of congestion at points of interconnection. We continued producing other related data collection and analysis to enable evaluation of these measurements in the larger context of the evolving ecosystem: quantifying a given ISP’s global routing footprint; classification of autonomous systems (ASes) according to business type; and mapping ASes to their owning organizations. In parallel, we examined the peering ecosystem from an economic perspective, exploring fundamental weaknesses and systemic problems of the currently deployed economic framework of Internet interconnection that will continue to cause peering disputes between ASes.

Monitoring Global Internet Security and Stability. We conduct other global monitoring projects, which focus on security and stability aspects of the global Internet: traffic interception events (hijacks), macroscopic outages, and network filtering of spoofed packets. Each of these projects leverages the existing Ark infrastructure, but each has also required the development of new measurement and data aggregation and analysis tools and infrastructure, now at various stages of development. We were tremendously excited to finally finish and release BGPstream, a software framework for processing large amounts of historical and live BGP measurement data. BGPstream serves as one of several data analysis components of our outage-detection monitoring infrastructure, a prototype of which was operating at the end of the year. We published four other papers that either use or leverage the results of internet scanning and other unsolicited traffic to infer macroscopic properties of the Internet.

Future Internet Architectures. The current TCP/IP architecture is showing its age, and the slow uptake of its ostensible upgrade, IPv6, has inspired NSF and other research funding agencies around the world to invest in research on entirely new Internet architectures. We continue to help launch this moonshot from several angles — routing, security, testbed, management — while also pursuing and publishing results of six empirical studies of IPv6 deployment and evolution.

Public Policy. Our final research thrust is public policy, an area that expanded in 2015, due to requests from policymakers for empirical research results or guidance to inform industry tussles and telecommunication policies. Most notably, the FCC and AT&T selected CAIDA to be the Independent Measurement Expert in the context of the AT&T/DirecTV merger, which turned out to be as much of a challenge as it was an honor. We also published three position papers each aimed at optimizing different public policy outcomes in the face of a rapidly evolving information and communication technology landscape. We contributed to the development of frameworks for ethical assessment of Internet measurement research methods.

Our infrastructure operations activities also grew this year. We continued to operate active and passive measurement infrastructure with visibility into global Internet behavior, and associated software tools that facilitate network research and security vulnerability analysis. In addition to BGPstream, we expanded our infrastructure activities to include a client-server system for allowing measurement of compliance with BCP38 (ingress filtering best practices) across government, research, and commercial networks, and analysis of resulting data in support of compliance efforts. Our 2014 efforts to expand our data sharing efforts by making older topology and some traffic data sets public have dramatically increased use of our data, reflected in our data sharing statistics. In addition, we were happy to help launch DHS’ new IMPACT data sharing initiative toward the end of the year.

Finally, as always, we engaged in a variety of tool development, and outreach activities, including maintaining web sites, publishing 27 peer-reviewed papers, 3 technical reports, 3 workshop reports, 33 presentations, 14 blog entries, and hosting 5 workshops. This report summarizes the status of our activities; details about our research are available in papers, presentations, and interactive resources on our web sites. We also provide listings and links to software tools and data sets shared, and statistics reflecting their usage. sources. Finally, we offer a “CAIDA in numbers” section: statistics on our performance, financial reporting, and supporting resources, including visiting scholars and students, and all funding sources.

For the full 2015 annual report, see http://www.caida.org/home/about/annualreports/2015/

NDN Next Phase Annual Report (2015-2016)

Thursday, June 30th, 2016 by kc

The Named Data Networking project recently published the NDN-NP annual report covering activities from May 2015 through April 2016.).

V. Jacobson, J. Burke, L. Zhang, T. Abdelzaher, B. Zhang, k. claffy, P. Crowley, J. Halderman, C. Papadopoulos, and L. Wang, “Named Data Networking Next Phase (NDN-NP) Project May 2015 – April 2016 Annual Report”, Tech. rep., Named Data Networking (NDN), Jun 2016.

This report summarizes our accomplishments during the second year of the Named Data Networking Next Phase (NDN-NP) project (the 5th year of the overall project. This phase of the project focuses on deploying and evaluating the NDN architecture in four environments: building automation management systems, mobile health, multimedia real-time conferencing tools, and scientific data applications. Implementation and testing of pilot applications in these network environments further demonstrated our research progress in namespace design, trust management, and encryption-based access control. Highlights from this year include:

  1. Continued evolution the NDN Forwarding Daemon (NFD), to support application-driven experimentation with new NDN protocol features.
  2. Development of an Android version of NFD to promote NDN experimentation on mobile platforms.
  3. Implementation of a new transport protocol (InfoMax) that can intelligently filter streams of information in order to reduce transmitted data volume, while minimizing loss of information.
  4. A growing portfolio of supporting software libraries, including new APIs, transport mechanisms (Sync, information maximization), and security functionality, that leverage inherent capabilities of NDN, e.g., schematized trust, name-based access control.
  5. Demonstration of extremely scalable forwarding implementation using a billion synthetic names.
  6. Implementation and evaluation of hyperbolic routing
    performance to understand its feasibility in supporting NDN’s
    interdomain routing.

  7. Multi-faceted evaluation of the architecture, from
    instrumentation of applications on the testbed, to uses of ndnSIM and the Mini-NDN emulator environment.

  8. Continued uses of NDN in the four courses taught by principal investigators.
  9. The second annual NDN Community meeting hosted by the
    NDN Consortium to promote a vibrant open source ecosystem of
    research and experimentation around NDN.

The NDN team has made tremendous progress in the last five years, and a larger community of information-centric networking research has evolved in parallel. Our progress revealed the importance of demonstrating NDN capabilities in IoT and big data environments, and highlighted the need for accessible software platform support and emulation capabilities to facilitate R\&D on both the NDN architecture and applications that leverage it. We have received a year of supplement funding to complete four tasks: 1) completing and disseminating native NDN applications and associated design patterns, 2) demonstrating NDN scalability; 3) documenting and releasing reference implementations, and 4) documenting NDN design decisions and lessons learned.