Archive for the 'Updates' 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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Hoiho API (Holistic Orthography of Internet Hostname Observations)

Monday, February 13th, 2023 by Bradley Huffaker

In December 2021, CAIDA published a method and system to automatically learn rules that extract geographic annotations from router hostnames. This is a challenging problem, because operators use different conventions and different dictionaries when they annotate router hostnames. For example, in the following figure, operators have used IATA codes (“iad”, “was”), a CLLI prefix (“asbnva”), a UN/LOCODE (“usqas”), and even city names (“ashburn”, “washington”) to refer to routers in approximately the same location — Ashburn, VA, US. Note that “ash” (router #4) is an IATA code for Nashua, NH, US, that the operators of he.net and seabone.net used to label routers in Ashburn, VA, US. Some operators also encoded the country (“us”) and state (“va”).

Our system, Hoiho, released as open-source as part of scamper, uses CAIDA’s Macroscopic Internet Topology Data Kit (ITDK) and observed round trip times to infer regular expressions that extract these apparent geolocation hints from hostnames. The ITDK contains a large dataset of routers with annotated hostnames, which we used as input to Hoiho for it infer rules (encoded as regular expressions) that extract these annotations. CAIDA has released these inferred rulesets in recent ITDKs.

Today, CAIDA is launching an API (api.hoiho.caida.org) and web front end (hoiho.caida.org) which returns extracted geographic locations from a user-provided list of DNS names. The API uses the rules that CAIDA infers with each ITDK. For embedded IATA, UN/LOCODE, and city names, the API returns the city name and a lat/long representing the location. For embedded CLLI codes, the API returns the CLLI code; please contact iconectiv for a dictionary that maps CLLI codes to locations.

Try the API out, and let us know if you find it useful!

[HOIHO] Luckie, M., Huffaker, B., Marder, A., Bischof, Z., Fletcher, M., and claffy, k., 2021. “Learning to Extract Geographic Information from Internet Router Hostnames.” ACM SIGCOMM Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT),
https://catalog.caida.org/paper/2021_learning_extract_geographic_information

CAIDA’s 2021 Annual Report

Monday, May 30th, 2022 by kc

The CAIDA annual report summarizes CAIDA’s activities for 2021 in the areas of research, infrastructure, data collection and analysis. Our research projects span: Internet cartography and performance; security, stability, and resilience studies; 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.
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!

IPv4 History Visualization

Thursday, August 6th, 2020 by Nicole Lee

This visualization shows how the growing demand for those addresses transformed the governance model from a handful of scientists and engineers managing these addresses to the multi-stakeholder governance model we have today. IPv4 (the fourth version of the Internet Protocol) is the governing standard of today’s Internet. Similar to any other network, unique identifiers play an integral role in Internet routing. We group IP address blocks based on the organization that regulates its allocation as recorded in IANA’s IPv4 address space file and the RFC.

Please view the visualization at: https://www.caida.org/publications/visualizations/ipv4-history/

Screenshots of the visualization

 

 

 

 

 

This was created with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF). For any questions or comments on this project, please contact info@caida.org.

CAIDA’s Annual Report for 2019

Monday, July 6th, 2020 by kc

The CAIDA annual report summarizes CAIDA’s activities for 2019, in the areas of research, infrastructure, data collection and analysis. Our research projects span Internet mapping, performance measurement, security, 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. The executive summary is excerpted below:
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AS Rank v2.1 Released (RESTFUL/Historical/Cone)

Wednesday, May 13th, 2020 by Bradley Huffaker
ASRankv2.1

(GraphQL/RESTFUL)

Responding to feedback from our user community, CAIDA has released version 2.1 of the AS Rank API. This update helps to reduce some of the complexity of the full-featured GraphQL interface through a simplified RESTful API.

AS Rank API version 2.1 adds support for historical queries as well as support for AS Customer Cones, defined as the set of ASes an AS can reach using customer links. You can learn more about AS relationships, customer cones, and how CAIDA sources the data at https://asrank.caida.org/about.

You can find the documentation for AS Rank API version 2.1 here https://api.asrank.caida.org/v2/restful/docs.

You can find documentation detailing how to make use of historical data and customer cones here https://api.asrank.caida.org/v2/docs.

CAIDA Team

CAIDA PhD student receives Microsoft Dissertation Grant for “Inferring Country-Level Transit Influence of Autonomous Systems”

Wednesday, August 7th, 2019 by Alberto Dainotti

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.

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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9th Workshop on Internet Economics

Tuesday, January 29th, 2019 by kc

On December 12-13, 2018, CAIDA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hosted the (invitation-only) 9th interdisciplinary Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE) at the University of California San Diego in La Jolla, CA.

The goal of this workshop series is to provide a forum for researchers, commercial Internet facilities and service providers, technologists, economists, theorists, policy makers, and other stakeholders to empirically inform emerging Internet regulatory and policy debates.

Presenters were asked to write talk abstracts on their presented topics, addressing four questions:

  1. What is the policy goal or fear you’re addressing?
  2. What data is needed to measure progress toward/away from this goal fear?
  3. What methods do you propose (or are) being used to gather such data?
  4. Who/how should such methods be executed, and the data shared, or not shared?

With a specific focus on measurement challenges, the topics we discussed included: analyzing the evolution of the Internet in a layered-platform context to gain new insights; measurement and analysis of economic impacts of new technologies using old tools; security and trustworthiness, reach (universal service) and reachability, sustainability of investment into public Internet infrastructure, as well as infrastructure to measure the public Internet.

Some of the takeaways from the workshop included:
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