SWIFT: Predictive Fast Reroute

Network operators often face the problem of remote outages in transit networks leading to significant (sometimes on the order of minutes) downtimes. The issue is that BGP, the Internet routing protocol, often converges slowly upon such outages, as large bursts of messages have to be processed and propagated router by router. In this paper, we present SWIFT, a fast-reroute framework which enables routers to restore connectivity in few seconds upon remote outages. SWIFT is based on two novel techniques. First, SWIFT deals with slow outage notification by predicting the overall extent of a remote failure out of few control-plane (BGP) messages. The key insight is that significant inference speed can be gained at the price of some accuracy. Second, SWIFT introduces a new data-plane encoding scheme, which enables quick and flexible update of the affected forwarding entries. SWIFT is deployable on existing devices, without modifying BGP. We present a complete implementation of SWIFT and demonstrate that it is both fast and accurate. In our experiments with real BGP traces, SWIFT predicts the extent of a remote outage in few seconds with an accuracy of ~90% and can restore connectivity for 99% of the affected destinations

An Open Platform to Teach How the Internet Practically Works

Each year at ETH Zurich, around 100 students collectively build and operate their very own Internet infrastructure composed of hundreds of routers and dozens of Autonomous Systems (ASes). Their goal? Enabling Internet-wide connectivity. We find this class-wide project to be invaluable in teaching our students how the Internet infrastructure practically works. Among others, our students have a much deeper understanding of Internet operations alongside their pitfalls. Besides students tend to love the project: clearly the fact that all of them need to cooperate for the entire Internet to work is empowering. In this paper, we describe the overall design of our teaching platform, how we use it, and interesting lessons we have learnt over the years. We also make our platform openly available.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figure

A Framework To Fast Reroute Traffic Upon Remote Outages

Nowadays, so many services – including critical ones – rely on the Internet to work that even a few minutes of connectivity disruption make customers unhappy and cause sizeable financial loss for companies. Ensuring that customers are always connected to the Internet is thus a top priority for Internet service providers. However, this is harder than one may think because the Internet is often subject to network outages. Network outages are a headache for network operators because they are unpredictable, can occur in any of the 70,000 independently operated networks composing the Internet, and can affect users’ connectivity network-wide. Far too often, the only way to restore connectivity upon an outage is to wait that (i) BGP, the glue of the Internet, converges; and (ii) the routers update their forwarding decisions accordingly. Unfortunately, these two processes work on a per-destination basis and are thus inherently slow given the always-increasing number of destinations in the Internet. It is therefore not a surprise that network operators still experience minutes of downtime upon outages. In this dissertation, we tackle the problem of fast connectivity recovery upon outages occurring in remote networks, without requiring network operators to change the standards, manufacture new devices, or cooperate with each other. The final result of our work is Snap, a framework that network operators can deploy on their routers and allows them to quickly detect outages and reroute tra ffic to working alternative paths that comply with the configured routing policies. Snap’s design follows a two-step recipe. First, it uses an outage inference algorithm based on new fundamental results and which, instead of waiting for the slow control-plane (BGP) notifications, analyzes the fast data-plane signals. Second, it uses a rerouting scheme that allows routers to quickly reroute all the a ffected traffi c to alternative paths circumventing the outage. Snap’s design takes advantage of the recent advances in network programmability and relies on a hardware-software codesign. To be fast, Snap collects data-plane signals at line-rate using programmable switches (e.g., Tofino). The switches then mirror the signals to a controller, which accurately infers remote outages and triggers tra ffic rerouting. We implemented Snap in P416 and Python and show its e ffectiveness in many real-world situations. Our results indicate that Snap can restore connectivity within a few seconds only, which is much faster than the few minutes often needed by traditional routers

MVP : measuring internet routing from the most valuable points

Scrutinizing BGP routes is part of the everyday tasks that network operators and researchers conduct to monitor their networks and measure Internet routing. This task is facilitated by the expansion of routing information services such as RIPE RIS [2] and Route-Views [3] that collect BGP routes from an increasing number of Vantage Points (VPs). Unfortunately, while more data is often beneficial, in the case of BGP, it involves downloading and processing large volumes of route updates that exhibit a high level of redundancy. Today with more than one billion route updates collected every day, users often have no other option than to focus on a subset of the VP. Because of the highly skewed location of the VP, randomly selecting them may result in a lot of missing information

An Open Platform to Teach How the Internet Practically Works

Each year at ETH Zurich, around 100 students collectively build and operate their very own Internet infrastructure composed of hundreds of routers and dozens of Autonomous Systems (ASes). Their goal? Enabling Internet-wide connectivity. We find this class-wide project to be invaluable in teaching our students how the Internet infrastructure practically works. Among others, our students have a much deeper understanding of Internet operations alongside their pitfalls. Besides students tend to love the project: clearly the fact that all of them need to cooperate for the entire Internet to work is empowering. In this paper, we describe the overall design of our teaching platform, how we use it, and interesting lessons we have learnt over the years. We also make our platform openly available [2].ISSN:0146-4833ISSN:1943-581

Quantification des interférences entre mesures sur la plateforme RIPE Atlas

International audiencePublic measurement platforms composed of low-end hardware devices such as RIPE Atlas have gained significant traction in the research community. Such platforms are indeed particularly interesting as they provide Internet-wide measurement capabilities together with an ever growing set of measurement tools. To be scalable though, they allow for concurrent measurements between users. This paper answers a fundamental question for any platform user : Do measurements launched by others impact my results ? If so, what can I do about it ? We measured the impact of multiple users running experiments in parallel on the RIPE Atlas platform. We found that overlapping measurements do interfere with each other. We found that increasing hardware CPU greatly helped in limiting interference on the measured delays

Blister Beetle Dermatitis Outbreaks in Mali

International audienceIntroduction Meloidae are distributed in temperate and arid regions but are also common in subtropical and tropical savannahs. These insects contain cantharidin, a vesicant substance that can cause poisoning by ingestion and dermatitis by direct contact. Material and Methods We describe recurrent Meloidae-related dermatitis outbreaks and their health impact by analyzing medical consultation records and meteorological data. Results Between 2015 and 2019, dermatitis outbreaks took place at a French military base at the end of the rainy season, from July to August, with 100 cases reported in 2015, 74 in 2017, 100 in 2018, and 36 in 2019. In 2017, the incidence rate was 4.4% for the base’s population. Initial medical consultations represented 31.5% of total medical care activity. Meloidae were identified as Cyaneolytta fryi. Conclusions These outbreaks of burn-like lesions, although clinically benign, can place a considerable burden on the medical activity of health care facilities. The diagnosis of Meloidae dermatitis is exclusively anamnestic and clinical and requires reported contact with the insect. The treatment protocol is that of standard burn care, and the best preventive measure is to avoid bright white lights. Military personnel, foreign workers, and travelers venturing into the Sahel should be warned of the risks associated with these beetles

A System to Detect Forged-Origin Hijacks

Despite global efforts to secure Internet routing, attack- ers still successfully exploit the lack of strong BGP security mechanisms. This paper focuses on an attack vector that is frequently used: Forged-origin hijacks, a type of BGP hijack where the attacker manipulates the AS path to make it im- mune to RPKI-ROV filters and appear as legitimate routing updates from a BGP monitoring standpoint. Our contribution is DFOH, a system that quickly and consistently detects forged- origin hijacks in the whole Internet. Detecting forged-origin hijacks boils down to inferring whether the AS path in a BGP route is legitimate or has been manipulated. We demonstrate that current state-of-art approaches to detect BGP anomalies are insufficient to deal with forged-origin hijacks. We identify the key properties that make the inference of forged AS paths challenging, and design DFOH to be robust against real-world factors (e.g., data biases). Our inference pipeline includes two key ingredients: (i) a set of strategically selected features, and (ii) a training scheme adapted to topological biases. DFOH detects 90.9% of the forged-origin hijacks within only ≈5min. In addition, it only reports ≈17.5 suspicious cases every day for the whole Internet, a small number that allows operators to investigate the reported cases and take countermeasures

Blister beetle dermatitis outbreaks in Mali.

Introduction: Meloidae are distributed in temperate and arid regions but are also common in subtropical and tropical savannahs. These insects contain cantharidin, a vesicant substance that can cause poisoning by ingestion and dermatitis by direct contact. Material and Methods: We describe recurrent Meloidae-related dermatitis outbreaks and their health impact by analyzing medical consultation records and meteorological data. Results: Between 2015 and 2019, dermatitis outbreaks took place at a French military base at the end of the rainy season, from July to August, with 100 cases reported in 2015, 74 in 2017, 100 in 2018, and 36 in 2019. In 2017, the incidence rate was 4.4% for the base’s population. Initial medical consultations represented 31.5% of total medical care activity. Meloidae were identified as Cyaneolytta fryi. Conclusions: These outbreaks of burn-like lesions, although clinically benign, can place a considerable burden on the medical activity of health care facilities. The diagnosis of Meloidae dermatitis is exclusively anamnestic and clinical and requires reported contact with the insect. The treatment protocol is that of standard burn care, and the best preventive measure is to avoid bright white lights. Military personnel, foreign workers, and travelers venturing into the Sahel should be warned of the risks associated with these beetles