Application-Level Traceroute: Adopting Mimetic Mechanisms to Increase Discovery Capabilities

Abstract

Traceroute is a popular network diagnostic tool used for discovering the Internet path towards a target host. Besides network diagnostic, in the last years traceroute has been used by researchers to discover the topology of the Internet. Some network administrators, however, congure their networks to not reply to traceroute probes or to block them (e.g. by using rewalls), preventing traceroute from providing details about the internal structure of their networks. In this paper we present camouage traceroute (camotrace), a traceroute-like tool aimed at discovering Internet paths even when standard traceroute is blocked. To this purpose, camotrace mimics the behavior of a popular TCP-based application-level protocol. We show preliminary results that conrm that camotrace is able to obtain additional information compared to standard traceroute.