1,318 research outputs found
A Multi-perspective Analysis of Carrier-Grade NAT Deployment
As ISPs face IPv4 address scarcity they increasingly turn to network address
translation (NAT) to accommodate the address needs of their customers.
Recently, ISPs have moved beyond employing NATs only directly at individual
customers and instead begun deploying Carrier-Grade NATs (CGNs) to apply
address translation to many independent and disparate endpoints spanning
physical locations, a phenomenon that so far has received little in the way of
empirical assessment. In this work we present a broad and systematic study of
the deployment and behavior of these middleboxes. We develop a methodology to
detect the existence of hosts behind CGNs by extracting non-routable IP
addresses from peer lists we obtain by crawling the BitTorrent DHT. We
complement this approach with improvements to our Netalyzr troubleshooting
service, enabling us to determine a range of indicators of CGN presence as well
as detailed insights into key properties of CGNs. Combining the two data
sources we illustrate the scope of CGN deployment on today's Internet, and
report on characteristics of commonly deployed CGNs and their effect on end
users
BitTorrent Sync: First Impressions and Digital Forensic Implications
With professional and home Internet users becoming increasingly concerned
with data protection and privacy, the privacy afforded by popular cloud file
synchronisation services, such as Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive, is coming
under scrutiny in the press. A number of these services have recently been
reported as sharing information with governmental security agencies without
warrants. BitTorrent Sync is seen as an alternative by many and has gathered
over two million users by December 2013 (doubling since the previous month).
The service is completely decentralised, offers much of the same
synchronisation functionality of cloud powered services and utilises encryption
for data transmission (and optionally for remote storage). The importance of
understanding BitTorrent Sync and its resulting digital investigative
implications for law enforcement and forensic investigators will be paramount
to future investigations. This paper outlines the client application, its
detected network traffic and identifies artefacts that may be of value as
evidence for future digital investigations.Comment: Proc. of Digtial Forensics Research Workshop (DFRWS EU 2014
BitTorrent Sync: Network Investigation Methodology
The volume of personal information and data most Internet users find
themselves amassing is ever increasing and the fast pace of the modern world
results in most requiring instant access to their files. Millions of these
users turn to cloud based file synchronisation services, such as Dropbox,
Microsoft Skydrive, Apple iCloud and Google Drive, to enable "always-on" access
to their most up-to-date data from any computer or mobile device with an
Internet connection. The prevalence of recent articles covering various
invasion of privacy issues and data protection breaches in the media has caused
many to review their online security practices with their personal information.
To provide an alternative to cloud based file backup and synchronisation,
BitTorrent Inc. released an alternative cloudless file backup and
synchronisation service, named BitTorrent Sync to alpha testers in April 2013.
BitTorrent Sync's popularity rose dramatically throughout 2013, reaching over
two million active users by the end of the year. This paper outlines a number
of scenarios where the network investigation of the service may prove
invaluable as part of a digital forensic investigation. An investigation
methodology is proposed outlining the required steps involved in retrieving
digital evidence from the network and the results from a proof of concept
investigation are presented.Comment: 9th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and
Security (ARES 2014
Peer-to-Peer Secure Updates for Heterogeneous Edge Devices
We consider the problem of securely distributing software updates to large scale clusters of heterogeneous edge compute nodes. Such nodes are needed to support the Internet of Things and low-latency edge compute scenarios, but are difficult to manage and update because they exist at the edge of the network behind NATs and firewalls that limit connectivity, or because they are mobile and have intermittent network access. We present a prototype secure update architecture for these devices that uses the combination of peer-to-peer protocols and automated NAT traversal techniques. This demonstrates that edge devices can be managed in an environment subject to partial or intermittent network connectivity, where there is not necessarily direct access from a management node to the devices being updated
Leech: BitTorrent and Music Piracy Sonification
This paper provides an overview of a multi-media composition, Leech, which aurally and visually renders BitTor- rent traffic. The nature and usage of BitTorrent networking is discussed, including the implications of widespread music piracy. The traditional usage of borrowed musical material as a compositional resource is discussed and expanded upon by including the actual procurement of the musical material as part of the performance of the piece.
The technology and tools required to produce this work, and the roles that they serve, are presented. Eight distinct streams of data are targeted for visualization and sonification: Torrent progress, download/upload rate, file name/size, number of peers, peer download progress, peer location, packet transfer detection, and the music being pirated. An overview of the methods used for sonifying and and visualizing this data in an artistic manner is presented
Entropy/IP: Uncovering Structure in IPv6 Addresses
In this paper, we introduce Entropy/IP: a system that discovers Internet
address structure based on analyses of a subset of IPv6 addresses known to be
active, i.e., training data, gleaned by readily available passive and active
means. The system is completely automated and employs a combination of
information-theoretic and machine learning techniques to probabilistically
model IPv6 addresses. We present results showing that our system is effective
in exposing structural characteristics of portions of the IPv6 Internet address
space populated by active client, service, and router addresses.
In addition to visualizing the address structure for exploration, the system
uses its models to generate candidate target addresses for scanning. For each
of 15 evaluated datasets, we train on 1K addresses and generate 1M candidates
for scanning. We achieve some success in 14 datasets, finding up to 40% of the
generated addresses to be active. In 11 of these datasets, we find active
network identifiers (e.g., /64 prefixes or `subnets') not seen in training.
Thus, we provide the first evidence that it is practical to discover subnets
and hosts by scanning probabilistically selected areas of the IPv6 address
space not known to contain active hosts a priori.Comment: Paper presented at the ACM IMC 2016 in Santa Monica, USA
(https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2987445). Live Demo site available at
http://www.entropy-ip.com
CLOSER: A Collaborative Locality-aware Overlay SERvice
Current Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing systems make use of a considerable percentage of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) bandwidth. This paper presents the Collaborative Locality-aware Overlay SERvice (CLOSER), an architecture that aims at lessening the usage of expensive international links by exploiting traffic locality (i.e., a resource is downloaded from the inside of the ISP whenever possible). The paper proves the effectiveness of CLOSER by analysis and simulation, also comparing this architecture with existing solutions for traffic locality in P2P systems. While savings on international links can be attractive for ISPs, it is necessary to offer some features that can be of interest for users to favor a wide adoption of the application. For this reason, CLOSER also introduces a privacy module that may arouse the users' interest and encourage them to switch to the new architectur
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