v2(GraphQL)

The new AS Rank API^v2 is ready for use. This new version reflects a move from a RESTful (v1) API to a GraphQL (v2) API. This will allow clients to create queries that specify which values they require and contain multiple resources. GraphQL, as a strongly-typed language, allows clients to know what data is available, in what format, and verify responses.

The User Interface (UI) can be found at http://asrank.caida.org. The Application Programming Interface (API^v2) serves at https://api.asrank.caida.org/v2/graphql and GraphiQL interface can be found at https://api.asrank.caida.org/docs.

We will be operating AS Rank API^v1 (http://as-rank.caida.org/api/v1) until March 1st, 2020, but it will no longer be updated. Current users should migrate to the v2 API before this date. Contact asrank-info@caida.org for migration assistance.

For those unfamiliar with GraphQL, it is a bit of a paradigm shift from the use of a RESTful API, in that GraphQL requires the client to specify precisely which values it needs. In the following example, the client wants to know an ASN’s transit degree. With a normal RESTful API, the client must retrieve the full record and extract the information it wants. A GraphQL API client must specify that it wants the ASN’s transit degree.

# request ASN 3356's degree
query={
   asn(asn:"3356") {
      asnDegree {
         transit
      }
   }
}
        

data={
   "asn": {
      "asnDegree": {
         "transit": 5255
    }
}

# request ASN 3356's record
/asns/3356?populate=1
                

GraphQL supports mixed record queries. The same query can include different record types, and can specify bindings (“joins”) between those resources. This approach reduces the number of API queries needed to retrieve related resources.

# request ASN 3356's asnName and 
# organization LPL-141-ARIN's rank.

query={
   asn(asn:"3356") {
      asnName
      organization {
        orgId
      }
   }
   organization(orgId:"LPL-141-ARIN") {
      rank
   }
}
        

# request ASN 3356's asnName and 
# it's organization's rank.

query={
   asn(asn:"3356") {
      asnName
      organization {
         rank
      }
   }
}
        

data={
    "asn": {
      "asnName": "LEVEL3"
      "organization": {
         "orgId": "LPL-141-ARIN" 
      }
    },
    "organization": {
      "rank": 1,
    }
}
        

data={
    "asn": {
      "asnName": "LEVEL3",
      "organization": {
        "rank": 1
      }
    }
  }
}
        

# request ASN 3356's record
/asns/3356?populate=1
                 

data={
  "name": "LEVEL3",
  "org": {
    "id": "LPL-141-ARIN",
    "name": "Level 3 Parent, LLC"
  },
  "clique": "true",
  "source": "ARIN",
  "cone": {
     ...                

data={
    "name": "Level 3 Parent, LLC",
    "rank": "1",
    "degree": {
      "asn": {
        "transit": 6999,
        "global": 7024
      },
      "org": {
        ....
                    

CAIDA intern Alex Gamero-Garrido, a PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego, was selected as one of eleven recipients of the 2019 Microsoft Research Dissertation Grants. Each dissertation grant provides funding to doctoral students at North American universities who are underrepresented in the field of computing. This is the third year Microsoft Research has offered these research grants. Microsoft Research scientists with expertise in the students’ topic areas reviewed the more than 200 proposals submitted and identified students pursuing technically excellent and societally impactful research.

Alex Gamero-Garrido’s dissertation, “Inferring Country-Level Transit Influence of Autonomous Systems” may be of interest to networking and cybersecurity researchers, policy makers and operators:

Our work explores the country-level influence exerted by transit providers, a set of networking organizations that often have less direct contact with users, but who are nonetheless responsible for delivering an important fraction of transnational traffic into and out of many countries, and who may have the capability to observe, manipulate, or disrupt some of that traffic. For instance, an accidental misconfiguration or a state-ordered disconnection implemented by one of these operators may render popular services delivered on the Internet (such as email or social media) unreachable in entire regions. These concerns are not abstract, as previous instances of state-ordered disconnections have propagated to other countries and temporarily disabled some of the world’s most popular services there. By studying the ways in which these operators (Autonomous Systems) connect to one another and to the rest of the Internet, we aim to highlight each country’s relative risk exposure.

Congratulations, Alex G!

Originally announced on the Microsoft Research Blog.