2008 was an exciting year for the Internet and no less exciting for CAIDA. As network-capable personal/computing devices became ever more affordable and ubiquitous, and developers continued the flow of [open] applications/protocols that make it easier to create, capture, edit, publish and share information at the increasing speeds allowed by optical fiber, cable, and wifi services, we continue to make vast empirically untested assumptions about how the Internet is financed, operated, and used. What’s going on under the hood of the engine of our new digitized economy?

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ICANN hired JAS to write an independent evaluation of ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee, which I’ve served on since 2003. JAS published a first draft on 16 February 2009, which I commented on on a few days later. The same week I also spent a couple hours on the phone with the report authors Jeff Schmidt and William Yang, who intend to release a final draft of their SSAC review next week, which will incorporate the feedback received on the first draft. It’s a tough job to evaluate a complex system like SSAC, but it’s good to see ICANN proactively pursuing independent objective evaluations. I’ll post a link to the final report here.

Update: In May 2015, ownership of Spoofer transferred from MIT to CAIDA

We are studying an empirical Internet question central to its security, stability, and sustainability: how many networks allow packets with spoofed (fake) IP addresses to leave their network destined for the global Internet? In collaboration with MIT, we have designed an experiment that enables the most rigorous analysis of the prevalence of IP spoofing thus far, and we need your help running a measurement to support this study.

This week Rob Beverly finally announced to nanog an update to spoofer he’s been working on for a few months. Spoofer is one of the coolest Internet measurement tool we’ve seen in a long time — especially now that he is using Ark nodes as receivers (of spoofed and non-spoofed packets), giving him 20X more path coverage than he could get with a single receiver at MIT.

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I get this question as often as I get any question about the Internet. finally, a visiting intern Mia Zhang from Beijing Jiaotung University has done a thorough literature roundup, extracting the best available data pertinent to this question that she could find in the public domain.

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As a follow-up to the recent press flurry about Dima’s routing research, Voice of San Diego interviewed us for several hours last week, and no doubt spent twice that time focused on trying to get a complex story mostly right. Hyperbolic headlines notwithstanding, the journalist who interviewed us, David Washburn, did an outstanding job of fact-checking and making sure he accurately represented our views. If this is the future of journalism, I’m not the least bit worried about the death of 20th century journalism models. The real fourth estate is in good hands.

I’ve written before about the growing consensus among experts that the Internet’s underlying communications routing algorithms are fundamentally unscalable, so I am delighted to have CAIDA’s routing research group led by Dima Krioukov achieve some fundamental routing research results worth extensive media coverage. We have not solved the Internet’s routing scalability problem, but these recent discoveries will help that cause.

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i gave a (faster, less understandable) version of this talk (pdf or slides+audio quicktime) at the October 2008 ARIN meeting in Los Angeles (original October version) and again to ISOC’s advisory council meeting in November. motivation: the end of the current addressing architecture, with scant understanding of how to retain all its positive features in the face of inevitable change. a topic i worry about more each year.

(peter cincotti sings as if we knows what we’re going through.)

The Internet, an undergrad project by UCSD graphic art student Jennifer Hsu, while at CAIDA internship this year. (She’s now in design school in NYC.)

CAIDA, ISC, OARC, and The Measurement Factory managed to repeat our annual Day in the Life of the Internet data collection experiment this year — using a 2-day window of 18-19 March 2008. As with last year’s DITL (DITL2007 announcement, DITL2007 summary), we tried to capture a complete 48-hour interval of traffic to as many DNS root nameservers as could participate, and also invited other data providers to participate on terms compatible with their data sharing policies. if you engage in ongoing measurement of an operational network, and collected data for some or all of 18-19 mar 2008, it’s not too late to contribute data or metadata to DITL2008!

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A reprint of a recent interview of kc claffy posted by the San Diego Supercomputer Center regarding the future of the Internet:

kc claffy has played a leading role in Internet research for more than a decade. She is the principal investigator for the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) which is based at SDSC and provides tools and analyses to promote a robust, scalable global Internet infrastructure. As a research scientist at SDSC her research interests include the collection, analysis, and visualization of workload, routing, topology, performance, and economic data on the Internet. She has been at SDSC since 1991 and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC San Diego.

Q: You co-founded the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, CAIDA, a little over 10 years ago. Can you tell us how CAIDA has evolved, and what you’re focusing on today?

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