712 research outputs found
Measuring internet activity: a (selective) review of methods and metrics
Two Decades after the birth of the World Wide Web, more than two billion people around the world are Internet users. The digital landscape is littered with hints that the affordances of digital communications are being leveraged to transform life in profound and important ways. The reach and influence of digitally mediated activity grow by the day and touch upon all aspects of life, from health, education, and commerce to religion and governance. This trend demands that we seek answers to the biggest questions about how digitally mediated communication changes society and the role of different policies in helping or hindering the beneficial aspects of these changes. Yet despite the profusion of data the digital age has brought upon us—we now have access to a flood of information about the movements, relationships, purchasing decisions, interests, and intimate thoughts of people around the world—the distance between the great questions of the digital age and our understanding of the impact of digital communications on society remains large. A number of ongoing policy questions have emerged that beg for better empirical data and analyses upon which to base wider and more insightful perspectives on the mechanics of social, economic, and political life online. This paper seeks to describe the conceptual and practical impediments to measuring and understanding digital activity and highlights a sample of the many efforts to fill the gap between our incomplete understanding of digital life and the formidable policy questions related to developing a vibrant and healthy Internet that serves the public interest and contributes to human wellbeing. Our primary focus is on efforts to measure Internet activity, as we believe obtaining robust, accurate data is a necessary and valuable first step that will lead us closer to answering the vitally important questions of the digital realm. Even this step is challenging: the Internet is difficult to measure and monitor, and there is no simple aggregate measure of Internet activity—no GDP, no HDI. In the following section we present a framework for assessing efforts to document digital activity. The next three sections offer a summary and description of many of the ongoing projects that document digital activity, with two final sections devoted to discussion and conclusions
The geopolitics behind the routes data travels: a case study of Iran
The global expansion of the Internet has brought many challenges to
geopolitics. Cyberspace is a space of strategic priority for many states.
Understanding and representing its geography remains an ongoing challenge.
Nevertheless, we need to comprehend Cyberspace as a space organized by humans
to analyse the strategies of the actors. This geography requires a
multidisciplinary dialogue associating geopolitics, computer science and
mathematics. Cyberspace is represented as three superposed and interacting
layers: the physical, logical, and informational layers. This paper focuses on
the logical layer through an analysis of the structure of connectivity and the
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). This protocol determines the routes taken by the
data. It has been leveraged by countries to control the flow of information,
and to block the access to contents (going up to full disruption of the
internet) or for active strategic purposes such as hijacking traffic or
attacking infrastructures. Several countries have opted for a BGP strategy. The
goal of this study is to characterize these strategies, to link them to current
architectures and to understand their resilience in times of crisis. Our
hypothesis is that there are connections between the network architecture
shaped through BGP, and strategy of stakeholders at a national level. We chose
to focus on the case of Iran because, Iran presents an interesting BGP
architecture and holds a central position in the connectivity of the Middle
East. Moreover, Iran is at the center of several ongoing geopolitical rifts.
Our observations make it possible to infer three ways in which Iran could have
used BGP to achieve its strategic goals: the pursuit of a self-sustaining
national Internet with controlled borders; the will to set up an Iranian
Intranet to facilitate censorship; and the leverage of connectivity as a tool
of regional influence
Chocolatine: Outage Detection for Internet Background Radiation
The Internet is a complex ecosystem composed of thousands of Autonomous
Systems (ASs) operated by independent organizations; each AS having a very
limited view outside its own network. These complexities and limitations impede
network operators to finely pinpoint the causes of service degradation or
disruption when the problem lies outside of their network. In this paper, we
present Chocolatine, a solution to detect remote connectivity loss using
Internet Background Radiation (IBR) through a simple and efficient method. IBR
is unidirectional unsolicited Internet traffic, which is easily observed by
monitoring unused address space. IBR features two remarkable properties: it is
originated worldwide, across diverse ASs, and it is incessant. We show that the
number of IP addresses observed from an AS or a geographical area follows a
periodic pattern. Then, using Seasonal ARIMA to statistically model IBR data,
we predict the number of IPs for the next time window. Significant deviations
from these predictions indicate an outage. We evaluated Chocolatine using data
from the UCSD Network Telescope, operated by CAIDA, with a set of documented
outages. Our experiments show that the proposed methodology achieves a good
trade-off between true-positive rate (90%) and false-positive rate (2%) and
largely outperforms CAIDA's own IBR-based detection method. Furthermore,
performing a comparison against other methods, i.e., with BGP monitoring and
active probing, we observe that Chocolatine shares a large common set of
outages with them in addition to many specific outages that would otherwise go
undetected.Comment: TMA 201
An Internet Heartbeat
Obtaining sound inferences over remote networks via active or passive
measurements is difficult. Active measurement campaigns face challenges of
load, coverage, and visibility. Passive measurements require a privileged
vantage point. Even networks under our own control too often remain poorly
understood and hard to diagnose. As a step toward the democratization of
Internet measurement, we consider the inferential power possible were the
network to include a constant and predictable stream of dedicated lightweight
measurement traffic. We posit an Internet "heartbeat," which nodes periodically
send to random destinations, and show how aggregating heartbeats facilitates
introspection into parts of the network that are today generally obtuse. We
explore the design space of an Internet heartbeat, potential use cases,
incentives, and paths to deployment
ICLab: A Global, Longitudinal Internet Censorship Measurement Platform
Researchers have studied Internet censorship for nearly as long as attempts
to censor contents have taken place. Most studies have however been limited to
a short period of time and/or a few countries; the few exceptions have traded
off detail for breadth of coverage. Collecting enough data for a comprehensive,
global, longitudinal perspective remains challenging. In this work, we present
ICLab, an Internet measurement platform specialized for censorship research. It
achieves a new balance between breadth of coverage and detail of measurements,
by using commercial VPNs as vantage points distributed around the world. ICLab
has been operated continuously since late 2016. It can currently detect DNS
manipulation and TCP packet injection, and overt "block pages" however they are
delivered. ICLab records and archives raw observations in detail, making
retrospective analysis with new techniques possible. At every stage of
processing, ICLab seeks to minimize false positives and manual validation.
Within 53,906,532 measurements of individual web pages, collected by ICLab in
2017 and 2018, we observe blocking of 3,602 unique URLs in 60 countries. Using
this data, we compare how different blocking techniques are deployed in
different regions and/or against different types of content. Our longitudinal
monitoring pinpoints changes in censorship in India and Turkey concurrent with
political shifts, and our clustering techniques discover 48 previously unknown
block pages. ICLab's broad and detailed measurements also expose other forms of
network interference, such as surveillance and malware injection.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Symposium on Security and
Privacy (Oakland 2020). San Francisco, CA. May 202
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