The CAIDA annual report (quite a bit later than usual this year due to an unprecedented level of activity in 2024 which we will report on earlier next year!) summarizes CAIDA’s activities for 2023 in the areas of research, infrastructure, data collection and analysis. The executive summary is excerpted below:

Infrastructure Operations and Design. Our research infrastructure funding from NSF, most notably the NSF mid-scale design project, allowed us to make significant progress in developing the next generation of Internet measurement infrastructure to enhance the security and utility of Internet measurements. We focused on creating innovative platforms and software tools for data collection, curation and utilization, particularly targeting data related to the security vulnerabilities within the packet carriage layer of the Internet, which often lead to significant harm. We enhanced infrastructure components that create data products or services requested by the community, including Archipelago (Ark), AS Rank, AS-to-Org mapping, DNS Zone Database (DZDB), Internet Topology Data Kit (ITDK), Facilitating Advances in Network Topology Analysis (FANTAIL), Periscope, Spoofer, and the UCSD Network Telescope. To support researchers trying to find and make use of the best available data from these and other infrastructures, we expanded and designed new functionality for our rich-context Resource Catalog for CAIDA Internet Data Science Resources, most notably data access via the catalog.

We also initiated the design of new infrastructure components – BGP, passive traffic capture, and active measurement – to overcome scaling limitations of current systems. To facilitate scientific use of the data generated by these platforms, we explored current and potential approaches to data analysis and visualization, addressing the needs for standardization, interoperability, AI readiness of our data and platforms. We engaged with partners from industry, academia, and government to gain insights into measurement needs and data acquisition infrastructure design.

Research. Our research continued to focus on Internet cartography (mapping), security, resilience, and performance studies, in the following categories.

Internet cartography and security. We developed and demonstrated new techniques for analyzing access-network topology to demonstrate the feasibility of of targeted attacks on access network infrastructure, and suggested possible mitigation approaches. We developed new metrics to identify and rank the most important networks from a connectivity perspective for countries around the world, with some case studies to illustrate the geopolitical insights provided by these metrics. We undertook two analyses related to the latest routing security techniques and their effectiveness, using global data sources. We completed the first phase of our effort to infer the semantics of BGP communities in the wild. Finally, we continued our DOD-funded research to build automated techniques to identify and avoid adversarial components of infrastructure paths and divert communications to safe paths.

Performance. We made progress on three projects related to Internet performance measurement. First, we designed and implemented a crowdsourcing-based platform (QUINCE) to measure the QoE of video streaming and video conferencing applications. Second, we are leveraging CloudBank resources to understand performance bottlenecks in commercial cloud connectivity. Finally, we began a new NSF-funded project to develop a new measurement toolkit to enable reproducible, comprehensive speed test infrastructure discovery and characterization, and consistent test parameters across platforms.

Policy. We proposed a new approach to routing security that achieves four design goals: improved incentive alignment to implement best practices; protection against path hijacks; expanded scope of such protection to customers of those engaged in the practices; and reliance on existing capabilities rather than needing complex new software in every participating router. We were motivated by the FCC’s Notice of Inquiry on Routing Security, and wanted to suggest an alternative to regulation, under which the industry can make practical, measurable progress against the threat of route hijacks in the short term by leveraging institutionalized cooperation rooted in transparency and accountability. We submitted our idea to the FCC public comment process.

With four industry and 11 academic partners, we undertook a detailed analysis of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks by integrating perspectives from both industry reports and academic research. We implemented a new approach to transparency with industry by aggregating target information (IPs) from academic sources and allowing industry players to join this data with their data sources revealing gaps in visibility and sharing results. This approach helped validate an industry-reported 2021-2022 drop in spoofed reflection-amplification attacks that increased again in 2023.

We analyzed and summarized elements of the EU Digital Services Act intended to ensure that independent, third-party researchers such as academics have access to the data necessary to understand the nature of the harms and the effectiveness of the mitigations.

Everything Else. As always, we engaged in a variety of tool development, data sharing, and outreach activities, including publishing 7 peer-reviewed papers, 5 blog entries, and 22 presentations, all indexed in CAIDA Resource Catalog. Our web site www.caida.org attracted approximately 261,770 unique visitors, with an average of 1.84 visits per visitor, serving an average of 3.13 pages per visit. During 2023, CAIDA employed 17 staff (researchers, programmers, data administrators, technical support staff), hosted 1 postdoc, 7 PhD students, 12 masters students, and 35 undergraduate students. We provide select highlights in this report; details are available in papers, presentations, blog, and interactive resources on our web sites. We list and link to publications, tools and data sets shared. Finally, we offer a CAIDA in numbers section: statistics on our performance, collaborators, finances and funding sources. We are still developing CAIDA’s program plan for 2025-2030. Please feel free to send comments or questions to info at caida dot org. Please note the link to donate to CAIDA at the top of our web site. UC San Diego charges no overhead on donations; it is tax-deductible and goes 100% to research (no university overhead)!

For the full 2023 annual report, see https://www.caida.org/about/annualreports/2023/

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024 at 8:12 am and is filed under Commentaries, Data Collection, Domain Name System (DNS), Economics, Future, Geolocation, Measurement, Meetings, Network Telescope, Performance, Policy, Review, Routing, Security, Topology, Updates, Visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.