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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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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[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/

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:

• Edward Markey‘s staffer Alec Bogdanoff, whom I met with WPI Professor Elke Rundensteiner
• Senator Ron Johnson‘s staffer Jenna Mathis, whom I met with University of Wisconsin Professor Mark Hill
• Rep. Darrell Issa‘s staffer Robert Rische
• Senator Barbara Boxer‘s staffers Nicole Frazer and Carl Welliver
• Senator Dianne Feinstein‘s staffers Tristan Colonius and John Lynch

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.

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.

[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/

As economic pressure imposed by IPv4 address exhaustion has grown, we seek methods to track deployment of IPv6, IPv4’s designated successor. We examine per-country allocation and deployment rates through the lens of the annual “Day in the Life of the Internet” (DITL) snapshots collected at the DNS roots by the DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (DNS-OARC) from 2009 to 2014.

For more details of data sources and analysis, see:
http://www.caida.org/research/policy/dns-country/

As part of our mission to foster a collaborative research environment in which data can be acquired and shared, CAIDA has developed a framework that promotes wide dissemination of our datasets to researchers. We classify a dataset as either public or restricted based on a consideration of privacy issues involved in sharing it, as described in our data sharing framework document Promotion of Data Sharing (http://www.caida.org/data/sharing/).

Public datasets are available for downloaded from our public dataserver (http://data.caida.org) subject to conditions specified in our Acceptable Use Agreement (AUA) for public data (http://www.caida.org/home/legal/aua/public_aua.xml). CAIDA provides access to restricted datasets conditionally to qualifying researchers of academic and CAIDA-member institutions agreeing to a more restrictive AUA (http://www.caida.org/home/legal/aua/).

In January 2014 we reviewed our collection of datasets in order to re-evaluate their classification. As a result, as of February 1, we have converted several popular restricted CAIDA datasets into public datasets, including most of one of our largest and most popular data collections: topology data from the (now retired) skitter measurement infrastructure (operational between 1998 and 2008), and its successor, the Archipelago (or Ark) infrastructure (operational since September 2007). We have now made all IPv4 measurements older than two years (which includes all skitter data) publicly available. In addition to the raw data, this topology data includes derived datasets such as the Internet Topology Data Kits (ITDKs). Further, to encourage research on IPv6 deployment, we made our IPv6 Ark topology and performance measurements, from,December 2008 up to the present, publicly available as a whole. We have added these new public data to the existing category of public data sets, which includes AS links data inferred from traceroute measurements taken by skitter and Ark platforms.

Several other datasets remain under consideration for public release, so stay tuned. For an overview of all datasets currently provided by CAIDA (both public and restricted) see our data overview page (http://www.caida.org/data/overview/).

Support for this data collection and sharing provided by DHS Science and Technology Directorate’s PREDICT project via Cooperative Agreement FA8750-12-2-0326 and NSF’s Computing Research Infrastructure Program via CNS-0958547.

We recently released a visualization at http://www.caida.org/research/topology/as_core_network/ that represents our macroscopic snapshots of IPv4 and IPv6 Internet topology samples captured in 2013. The plots illustrate both the extensive geographical scope as well as rich interconnectivity of nodes participating in the global Internet routing system.

IPv4 and IPv6 AS Core Graph, Jan 2013

This AS core visualization addresses one of CAIDA’s topology mapping project goals is to develop techniques to illustrate structural relationships and depict critical components of the Internet infrastructure. These IPv4 and IPv6 graphs show the relative growth of the two Internet topologies, and in particular the steady continued growth of the IPv6 topology. Although both IPv4 and IPv6 topologies experienced a lot of churn, the net change in number of ASes was 3,290 (10.7%) in our IPv4 graph and 495 (25.7%) in our IPv6 graph.

In order to improve our AS Core visualization over previous years, this year we made two major refinements to our graphing methodology, including how we rank individual ASes. First, we now rank ASes based on their transit degree rather then their outdegree. Second, we now infer links across Internet eXchange (IX) point address space, rather than considering the IX itself a node to which various ISPs attach. Details at http://www.caida.org/research/topology/as_core_network/.

[For details on a more sophisticated methodology for ranking AS interconnectivity, based on inferring AS relationships from BGP data, see http://www.caida.org/data/active/as-relationships/.]

[This blog entry is guest written by Robert Beverly at the Naval Postgraduate School.]

In many respects, the deployment, adoption, use, and performance of IPv6 has received more recent attention than IPv4. Certainly the longitudinal measurement of IPv6, from its infancy to the exhaustion of ICANN v4 space to native 1% penetration (as observed by Google), is more complete than IPv4. Indeed, there are many vested parties in (either the success or failure) of IPv6, and numerous IPv6 measurement efforts afoot.

Researchers from Akamai, CAIDA, ICSI, NPS, and MIT met in early January, 2013 to firstly share and make sense of current measurement initiatives, while secondly plotting a path forward for the community in measuring IPv6. A specific objective of the meeting was to understand which aspects of IPv6 measurement are “done” (in the sense that there exists a sound methodology, even if measurement should continue), and which IPv6 questions/measurements remain open research problems. The meeting agenda and presentation slides are archived online.

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With IPv6 Launch approaching, there is increasing interest in measuring the readiness of the IPv6 infrastructure. A major concern, particularly for networks that source or sink content, is the performance that is achievable over IPv6, and how it compares to the performance over IPv4. A recent study by Nikkah et al. argues that data plane performance, as measured by web page download times, is largely comparable in IPv4 and IPv6, as long as the AS-level paths in IPv4 and IPv6 are identical.  We have confirmed these findings with our own measurements covering 593 dual-stack ASes: we found that 79% of paths had IPv6 performance within 10% of IPv4 (or IPv6 had better performance) if the forward AS-level path was the same in both protocols, while only 63% of paths had similar performance if the forward AS-level path was different.

Given the apparent importance of congruent AS-level paths in IPv4 and IPv6, we measured to what extent such congruence exists today, and how this has evolved historically. We measure IPv4 and IPv6 AS paths from seven vantage points (ACOnet/AS1853, IIJ/AS2497, NTT/AS2914, Tinet/AS3257, HE/AS6939, AT&T/AS7018, NL-BIT/AS12859) which have provided BGP data to Routeviews and RIPE RIS since 2003. The figure below plots the fraction of dual-stack paths that are identical in IPv4 and IPv6 from each vantage point over time. According to this metric, IPv6 paths are maturing slowly. In January 2004, 10-20% of paths were the same for IPv4 and IPv6; eight years later, 40-50% of paths are the same for six of the seven vantage points.

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