Measurement and Analysis for Protocols Research Group (maprg) Agenda at IETF-100 (Singapore)

Date: Monday, Nov 13, 15:50-17:20 (Afternoon session II)
Room: Padang

Intro & Overview [slides]

Mirja Kühlewind
10 min

Heads-up talk: Net Neutrality Measurements: Regulatory Use Case and Problem Statement [slides]

See draft-nieminen-ippm-nn-measurements

Klaus Nieminen
5 min

Update on previous presentation: A Continuing Study of the Active IPv6 WWW Client Address Space [slides]

Kyle Rose (previously presented by Dave Plonka)
5 min

Principles for Measurability in Protocol Design [slides]

Brian Trammell
20 min

The Root Canary: measuring the root KSK rollover and beyond [slides]

Roland van Rijswijk
20 min

Recursives in the Wild: Engineering Authoritative DNS Servers [slides]

Giovane C. M. Moura
15 min

Verfploeter: Broad and Load-Aware Anycast Mapping [slides]

Wes Hardaker
15 min

Abstracts

Principles for Measurability in Protocol Design (Mark Allman, Robert Beverly, Brian Trammell)

Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.02902.pdf
Measurement has become fundamental to the operation of networks and at-scale services---whether for management, security, diagnostics, optimization, or simply enhancing our collective understanding of the Internet as a complex system. Further, measurements are useful across points of view---from end hosts to enterprise networks and data centers to the wide area Internet. We observe that many measurements are decoupled from the protocols and applications they are designed to illuminate. Worse, current measurement practice often involves the exploitation of side-effects and unintended features of the network, or, in other words, the artful piling of hacks atop one another. This state of affairs is a direct result of the relative paucity of diagnostic and measurement capabilities built into today's network stack.
Given our modern dependence on ubiquitous measurement, we propose measurability as an explicit low-level goal of current protocol design, and argue that measurements should be available to all network protocols throughout the stack. We seek to generalize the idea of measurement within protocols, e.g., the way in which TCP relies on measurement to drive its end-to-end behavior. Rhetorically, we pose the question: what if the stack had been built with measurability and diagnostic support in mind? We start from a set of principles for explicit measurability, and define primitives that, were they supported by the stack, would not only provide a solid foundation for protocol design going forward, but also reduce the cost and increase the accuracy of measuring the network.

The Root Canary: measuring the root KSK rollover and beyond (Roland van Rijswijk, Willem Toorop, Moritz Müller)

Hopefully, it has not escaped most people's notice that ICANN is in the process of replacing the DNSSEC signing key (KSK) for the root zone of the DNS. This event, which started with the publication of the new key in July of this year, is unique, as it is the first time ever that the key for the root is replaced. In this presentation, we discuss the "Root Canary" project, the goal of which is to monitor and measure this root key rollover. Using tens of thousands of vantage points worldwide (RIPE Atlas probes and through the Luminati VPN proxy network), the Root Canary project measures the impact of the root key rollover and can function as a proverbial "canary-in-the-coalmine" if resolvers start exhibiting problems during the key rollover. The presentation will discuss how the Root Canary project is set up, and shows current results. In addition to this, we discuss spin-off results, such as the DNSSEC algorithm support test. We will end by discussing ICANN's recent decision to "pause" the root key rollover process, and what this means for our project. For more information, see https://rootcanary.org/

Recursives in the Wild: Engineering Authoritative DNS Servers (Moritz Müller, Giovane C. M. Moura)

Paper: https://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Mueller17b.html
DNS operators strive for to reduce latency for users of their service. However, because they control only their servers, and not how their clients choose among the servers, it is difficult to insure that that clients will be answered with optimal latency. Knowing how clients (recursive resolvers) choose authoritative servers is a key step to better engineer authoritative servers deployments. In this presentation, we employ active measurements using 9,000+ Ripe Atlas probes to determine, in the wild, how recursive resolvers choose authoritative servers. We found a consistent behavior in seven different geographic configurations of authoritatives: recursives query all available authoritative servers regardless of latency, but the distribution of queries tend to be skewed towards authoritatives with lower latency. We also discuss the implications of these findings for DNS operators in engineering their services.

Verfploeter: Broad and Load-Aware Anycast Mapping (Wouter B. de Vries, Ricardo de O. Schmidt, Wes Haraker, John Heidemann, Pieter-Tjerk de Boer and Aiko Pras)

Paper: https://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Vries17a.html
IP anycast provides DNS operators and CDNs with automatic fail-over and reduced latency by breaking the Internet into catchments, each served by a different anycast site. Unfortunately, understanding and predicting changes to catchments as sites are added or removed has been challenging. Current tools such as RIPE Atlas or commercial equivalents map from thousands of vantage points (VPs), but their coverage can be inconsistent around the globe. This paper proposes Verfploeter, a new method that maps anycast catchments using active probing. During this talk, Wes Hardaker will give a brief overview of the technique and the results and discuss how the results may apply to development of connection based protocols within the IETF. Specifically, Wes will discuss the results of measuring anycast networks for stability for use with TCP connections and other multi-packet based protocols.