Date: Wednesday, 29 March 2023, Session III 1530-1700
Full client with Video: https://meetecho.ietf.org/conference/?group=maprg&short=maprg&item=1
Room: G401-G402 (Breakout 8, 4th Floor)
In this paper, we revisit the performance of the QUIC connection setup and relate the design choices for fast and secure connections to common Web deployments. We analyze over 1M Web domains with 272k QUIC-enabled services and find two worrying results. First, current practices of creating, providing, and fetching Web certificates undermine reduced round trip times during the connection setup since sizes of 35% of server certificates exceed the amplification limit. Second, non-standard server implementations lead to larger amplification factors than QUIC permits, which increase even further in IP spoofing scenarios. We present guidance for all involved stakeholders to improve the situation.
Link to paper as published with ACM CoNEXT '22, awarded Best Paper: https://ilab-pub.imp.fu-berlin.de/papers/nthms-ibtcq-22.pdf
LEO satellite networks possess highly dynamic topologies, with satellites moving at 27,000 km/hour to maintain their orbit. As satellites move, the characteristics of the satellite network routes change, triggering rerouting events. Frequent rerouting can cause poor performance for path-adaptive algorithms (e.g., congestion control). In this paper, we provide a thorough characterization of route variability in LEO satellite networks, focusing on route churn and RTT variability. We show that high route churn is common, with most paths used for less than half of their lifetime. With some paths used for just a few seconds. This churn is also unnecessary with rerouting leading to marginal gains in most cases (e.g., less than a 15% reduction in RTT). Moreover, we show that the high route churn is harmful to network utilization and congestion control performance. By examining RTT variability, we find that the smallest achievable RTT between two ground stations can increase by 2.5× as satellites move in their orbits. We show that the magnitude of RTT variability depends on the location of the communicating ground stations, exhibiting a spatial structure. Finally, we show that adding more satellites, and providing more routes between stations, does not necessarily reduce route variability. Rather, constellation configuration (i.e., the number of orbits and their inclination) plays a more significant role. We hope that the findings of this study will help with designing more robust routing algorithms for LEO satellite networks.
In the proceedings of the Passive and Active Measurement 24th International Conference, PAM 2023, Virtual Event, March 21–23, 2023
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-28486-1_14
The Internet is heterogeneous, spanning many diffent types of networks. Wide-scale measurements (e.g. to a large number of targets or from a large number of vantage points) are very useful to understand it and to guide protocol standardisation.
Using extension headers as an example, we will discuss lessons learned from building wide-scale active Internet measurements and identify mistakes that have at some point or another ruined our measurement campaigns. I will give concrete examples from experiments to measure IPv6 Hop-by-Hop and Destination Option Extension Headers over a variety of paths in the past 8 years to help others avoid the same pitfalls in the future.
Network latency is a critical factor for the perceived quality of experience for many applications. With an increasing focus on interactive and real-time applications, which require reliable and low latency, the ability to continuously and efficiently monitor latency is becoming more important than ever. Always-on passive monitoring of latency can provide continuous latency metrics without injecting any traffic into the network. However, software-based monitoring tools often struggle to keep up with traffic as packet rates increase, especially on contemporary multi-Gbps interfaces. We investigate the feasibility of using eBPF to enable efficient passive network latency monitoring by implementing an evolved Passive Ping (ePPing). Our evaluation shows that ePPing delivers accurate RTT measurements and can handle over 1 Mpps, or correspondingly over 10 Gbps, on a single core, greatly improving on state-of-the-art software based solutions, such as PPing.
In the proceedings of the Passive and Active Measurement 24th International Conference, PAM 2023, Virtual Event, March 21–23, 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28486-1_9
Recent developments in Internet protocols and services aim to provide enhanced security and privacy for user traffic. Apple's iCloud Private Relay is a premier example of this trend, introducing a well-provisioned, multi-hop architecture to protect the privacy of users' traffic while minimizing the traditional drawbacks of additional network hops (e.g., latency). Announced in 2021, the service is currently in the beta stage, offering an easy and cheap privacy-enhancing alternative directly integrated into Apple's operating systems and core applications. This seamless integration makes a future massive adoption of the technology very likely, calling for studies on its impact on the Internet. Indeed, the iCloud Private Relay architecture inherently introduces computational and routing overheads, possibly hampering performance. In this work, we study the service from a performance perspective, across a variety of scenarios and locations. We show that iCloud Private Relay not only reduces speed test performance (up to 10x decrease) but also negatively affects page load time and download/upload throughput in different scenarios. Interestingly, we find that the overlay routing introduced by the service may increase performance in some cases. Our results call for further investigations into the effects of a large-scale deployment of similar multi-hop privacy-enhancing architectures. For increasing the impact of our work and to aid in reproducibility, we contribute our testbed software and measurements to the community.
In the proceedings of the Passive and Active Measurement 24th International Conference, PAM 2023, Virtual Event, March 21–23, 2023
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-28486-1_1