The domain name system (DNS) is a core component of the Internet. It performs the vital task of mapping human readable names into machine readable data (such as IP addresses, which hosts handle e-mail, and so on). The content of the DNS reveals a lot about the technical operations of a domain. Thus, studying the state of large parts of the DNS over time reveals valuable information about the evolution of the Internet. We collect a unique long-term data set with daily DNS measurements for all the domains under the main top-level domains (TLDs) on the Internet (including .com, .net, and .org, comprising 50% of the global DNS name space). This paper discusses the challenges of performing such a large-scale active measurement. These challenges include scaling the daily measurement to collect data for the largest TLD (.com, with 123M names) and ensuring that a measurement of this scale does not impose an unacceptable burden on the global DNS infrastructure. The paper discusses the design choices we have made to meet these challenges and documents the design of the measurement system we implemented based on these choices. Two case studies related to cloud e-mail services illustrate the value of measuring the DNS at this scale. The data this system collects is valuable to the network research community. Therefore, we end this paper by discussing how we make the data accessible to other researchers.

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In the early days of network and service management, researchers paid much attention to the design of management frameworks and protocols. Since then the focus of research has shifted from the development of management technologies towards the analysis of management data. From the five FCAPS areas, security of networks and services has become a key challenge. For example, brute-force attacks against Web applications, and compromises resulting thereof, are widespread. Talks with several Top-10 Web hosting companies in the Netherlands reflect that detection of these attacks is often done based on log file analysis on servers, or by deploying host-based intrusion detection systems (IDSs) and firewalls. However, such host-based solutions have several problems. In this paper we therefore investigate the feasibility of a network-based monitoring approach, which detects brute-force attacks against and compromises of Web applications, even in encrypted environments. Our approach is based on per-connection histograms of packet payload sizes in flow data that are exported using IPFIX. We validate our approach using datasets collected in the production network of a large Web hoster in the Netherlands.

Denial-of-Service attacks have rapidly increased in terms of frequency and intensity, steadily becoming one of the biggest threats to Internet stability and reliability. However, a rigorous comprehensive characterization of this phenomenon, and of countermeasures to mitigate the associated risks, faces many infrastructure and analytic challenges. We make progress toward this goal, by introducing and applying a new framework to enable a macroscopic characterization of attacks, attack targets, and DDoS Protection Services (DPSs). Our analysis leverages data from four independent global Internet measurement infrastructures over the last two years: backscatter traffic to a large network telescope; logs from amplification honeypots; a DNS measurement platform covering 60% of the current namespace; and a DNS-based data set focusing on DPS adoption. Our results reveal the massive scale of the DoS problem, including an eye-opening statistic that one-third of all /24 networks recently estimated to be active on the Internet have suffered at least one DoS attack over the last two years. We also discovered that often targets are simultaneously hit by different types of attacks. In our data, Web servers were the most prominent attack target; an average of 3% of the Web sites in .com, .net, and .org were involved with attacks, daily. Finally, we shed light on factors influencing migration to a DPS. CCS CONCEPTS• Networks → Denial-of-service attacks; Network management; • Security and privacy → Security services; Web protocol security;

Policy makers in regions such as Europe are increasingly concerned about the trustworthiness and sovereignty of the foundations of their digital economy, because it often depends on systems operated or manufactured elsewhere. To help curb this problem, we propose the novel notion of a responsible Internet, which provides higher degrees of trust and sovereignty for critical service providers (e.g., power grids) and all kinds of other users by improving the transparency, accountability, and controllability of the Internet at the network-level. A responsible Internet accomplishes this through two new distributed and decentralized systems. The first is the Network Inspection Plane (NIP), which enables users to request measurement-based descriptions of the chains of network operators (e.g., ISPs and DNS and cloud providers) that handle their data flows or could potentially handle them, including the relationships between them and the properties of these operators. The second is the Network Control Plane (NCP), which allows users to specify how they expect the Internet infrastructure to handle their data (e.g., in terms of the security attributes that they expect chains of network operators to have) based on the insights they gained from the NIP. We discuss research directions and starting points to realize a responsible Internet by combining three currently largely disjoint research areas: large-scale measurements (for the NIP), open source-based programmable networks (for the NCP), and policy making (POL) based on the NIP and driving the NCP. We believe that a responsible Internet is the next stage in the evolution of the Internet and that the concept is useful for clean slate Internet systems as well.