About five years ago two projects, Zmap and Masscan, helped to shift the way that many researchers thought about the Internet. The tools both provide a relatively optimized code path for sending packets and collecting replies, and allow a researcher with moderate resources to attempt connections to every computer on the IPv4 Internet in about… Continue reading Thoughts on IPv6 Measurement
Category: Online
Video from my CCC talk last week is here.
Internet Censorship 2016
We have reached the end of 2016, as well as the annual CCC congress in Germany. I had the exciting chance to speak together with Philipp Winter on the shifting landscape of Internet censorship in 2016. The talk followed mostly the same format as last year’s, calling out the continuing normalization and ubiquity of censorship… Continue reading Internet Censorship 2016
First-party Google Analytics
Third party analytics services are suffering from the growing prevalence of ad blocking, tracking protection, and the trend of minimizing connections and requests. However, from a site owner perspective, receiving usage information remains important for measuring site growth. My expectation is that we are already on the curve where ads and tracking software will be… Continue reading First-party Google Analytics
Thoughts on China’s Updated Cyber-security Regulations
On Monday, China ratified an updated cybersecurity legislation that will enter effect next June. The policy regulates a number of aspects of the Chinese Internet: What data companies need to keep on domestic servers, the interaction between companies and the government, and the interaction between companies and Chinese users. Notably, when considering the impact on… Continue reading Thoughts on China’s Updated Cyber-security Regulations
Watch your PAC
In the last week at Blackhat / Defcon two groups looked deeply at one of the lesser known implementations of network policy called Proxy Autoconfig. (In particular, badWPAD by Maxim and Crippling HTTPS with unholy PAC by Safebreach.) Proxy AutoConfig (PAC) is a mechanism used by many organizations to configure an advanced policy for connecting… Continue reading Watch your PAC
Stunning
I’ve started to dive once again into the mess of connection establishment. Network address translation (NAT) is a reality today for most Internet users, and poses a significant hurdle in creating the user-user (or peer-peer) connections. NAT is the process used by your router to provide multiple internal (192.168.x.x) addresses that are all only visible… Continue reading Stunning
Another year, another dive into what’s changed in running a web server. This VM is now basically up-to-date, and supports most of the shiny new web transport improvements, like HTTP/2 and OCSP stapling. Hopefully nothing broke too badly in the process.
Excited to see Satellite chosen as best student paper this year at USENIX ATC. Slides and audio from the talk should be online shortly.
The CS department, as always, is on top of its news releases.
Satellite
I’m excited to present Satellite, a network measurement project I’ve been working on over the last couple years, at USENIX ATC next month. Satellite takes a look at understanding shared CDN behaviors and automatically detecting censorship by regularly querying open DNS resolvers around the world. For example, we can watch the trends in censorship in… Continue reading Satellite