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:

This annual report summarizes CAIDA’s activities for 2018 in the areas of research, infrastructure, data collection and analysis. Our research projects span Internet cartography, security and stability studies (of outages, performance, and vulnerabilities), economics, 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.

Internet Mapping and Performance Measurement. Most notably, we completed our NSF-funded study of interconnection congestion, which required maintaining significant software, hardware, and data processing infrastructure for years to observe, calibrate and analyze trends. We also undertook several research efforts in how to identify and characterize different types of congestion and effects on quality of experience. Our original motivation for this work was an increase in heated peering disputes between powerful players in the U.S. which raised questions about intentional degradation of performance as a business strategy to obtain (or avoid) interconnection fees. The prevalence of these public disputes dropped around the time of the FCCs 2015 Open Internet Order, in which the FCC asserted authority over interconnection, sending a signal to industry to resolve disputes or trigger regulatory oversight. However, our measurements reveal indications of persistently congested transit links, which regardless of cause implies clear motivation for large players to engage in direct peering negotiations. The most important contribution of this work was addressing this decades-long gap in an objective third-party’s ability to study peering disputes in an open, objective, scientifically validated way. Especially in today’s deregulatory political climate, we consider such measurement to be the most promising strategy for incentivizing good ISP behavior. Other Internet cartography studies we undertook included: extending our ability to identify interconnection boundaries; revealing the load-balancing behavior of YouTube traffic on interdomain links; tracking the topological evolution of content providers in the Internet core; analyzing the African web ecosystem; and inferring carrier-grade NAT deployment without access to a vantage point behind the NAT.

Monitoring Global Internet Security and Stability. Our activities in Internet security and stability monitoring included: surveying network operators on BGP prefix hijacking and developing approaches to quickly neutralize this threat; characterizing the Denial-of-Service ecosystems, and attempts to mitigate DoS attacks via BGP blackholing; and devising metrics to infer the influence of specific Autonomous Systems (ASes) on country-level Internet connectivity. We also continued support for the Spoofer project, including supporting the existing Spoofer measurement platform as well as developing and applying new methods to expand visibility of compliance with source address validation best practices.

Economics and Policy. We published a study on the policy implications of our interconnection measurements, which included attempts to visualize the data in ways we considered most informative to policymakers. We published a study of a game-theoretic approach to interconnection modeling. Finally, we held another lively workshop on Internet economics, where we continued the discussion on what a future Internet regulatory framework should look like. The likelihood of federal regulation is increasing, if only to mitigate the risk of dealing with a patchwork of statelaws related to network management or piracy. There is an expanding awareness that if policymakers hope to rely on academic or scientific research toinform policy, there will need to be increased accuracy and disclosure of data relevant to a given question. As the ecosystem evolves, required measurements/reporting could span from metrics such as se-curity incidents; outages; broadband availability, cost, and pricing; cloud computing capacity and traffic; consumer usage patterns; how various parties in the ecosystem use consumer data. Policymakers and academics must tie the need for these measurements to concrete harms that they would support monitoring. There is also an increasing need to identify sustainable sources of funding for independent, open, trusted measurement of the Internet, and its communication to users and policy makers.

Infrastructure Operations. We continued to operate active and passive measurement infrastructure to provide visibility into global Internet behavior, and associated software tools that facilitate network research and security vulnerability analysis for the community. We made progress on our new project to integrate and increase the accessibility of several of our data collection platforms, starting with improving AS Rank and MANIC (Measurement and Analysis of Interdomain Congestion), and creating APIs for these and other platforms. We also maintained data analytics platforms for Internet Outage Detection and Analysis (IODA) and BGP data analytics (BGPStream).

As always, we engaged in a variety of tool development, and outreach activities, including maintaining web sites, publishing 15 peer-reviewed papers, 1 technical reports, 2 workshop reports, 30 presentations, 9 blog entries. 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 provide listings and links to software tools and data sets shared, and statistics reflecting their usage. 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.

CAIDA’s program plan for 2018-2021 is available at at www.caida.org/home/about/progplan/progplan2018/. Please feel free to send comments or questions to info at caida dot org.

For the full 2018 annual report, see http://www.caida.org/home/about/annualreports/2018/

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