Few Throats to Choke: On the Current Structure of the Internet

Acharya, H. B.; Chakravarty, Sambuddho; Gosain, Devashish

doi:10.1109/lcn.2017.78

Cited by 14 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…A possible objection to our method is that several of the "heavyhitter" ASes of the Internet [28] may themselves be adversaries, as they are hosted in censorious nations [29]. However, in this paper, we show that only a handful of ASes (≈ 30) are needed to host Decoy Routers, even when we restrict ourselves from using ASes in adversary countries such as Russia or China.…”

Section: On the Placement Of Drsmentioning

confidence: 84%

The Devil's in The Details

Gosain

Agarwal

Chakravarty

et al. 2017

Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

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Decoy Routing, the use of routers (rather than end hosts) as proxies, is a new direction in anti-censorship research. Decoy Routers (DRs), placed in Autonomous Systems, proxy traffic from users; so the adversary, e.g. a censorious government, attempts to avoid them. It is quite difficult to place DRs so the adversary cannot route around them -for example, we need the cooperation of 850 ASes to contain China alone [1].In this paper, we consider a different approach. We begin by noting that DRs need not intercept all the network paths from a country, just those leading to Overt Destinations, i.e. unfiltered websites hosted outside the country (usually popular ones, so that client traffic to the OD does not make the censor suspicious). Our first question is -How many ASes are required for installing DRs to intercept a large fraction of paths from e.g. China to the topn websites (as per Alexa)? How does this number grow with n ? To our surprise, the same few (≈ 30) ASes intercept over 90% of paths to the top n sites worldwide, for n = 10, 20...200 and also to other destinations. Investigating further, we find that this result fits perfectly with the hierarchical model of the Internet [2]; our first contribution is to demonstrate with real paths that the number of ASes required for a world-wide DR framework is small (≈ 30). Further, censor nations' attempts to filter traffic along the paths transiting these 30 ASes will not only block their own citizens, but others residing in foreign ASes.Our second contribution in this paper is to consider the details of DR placement: not just in which ASes DRs should be placed to intercept traffic, but exactly where in each AS. We find that even with our small number of ASes, we still need a total of about 11, 700 DRs. We conclude that, even though a DR system involves far fewer ASes than previously thought, it is still a major undertaking. For example, the current routers cost over 10.3 billion USD, so if Decoy Routing at line speed requires all-new hardware, the cost alone would make such a project unfeasible for most actors (but not for major nation states).

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Section: On the Placement Of Drsmentioning

confidence: 84%

The Devil's in The Details

Gosain

Agarwal

Chakravarty

et al. 2017

Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

Self Cite

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“…Second, in Africa, like in the Global South in general, countries rely on foreign investment in internet infrastructure if they wanted to foster the stimulating effect of ICT on economic development (Garbe, 2021;Jin & Cho, 2015). Overall, the telecommunications sector tends to be centralized in African countries, which is typical for the Global South where few ISPs tend to control internet traffic for larger parts of the population (Acharya et al, 2017;Main, 2001). Several of the multinational corporations providing internet access in Africa, including Airtel, Etisalat, Ooreedo or Viettel, have subsidiaries in other developing regions as well.…”

Section: The Telecommunications Ownership and Control (Tosco) Datasetmentioning

confidence: 99%

The political power of internet business: A comprehensive dataset of Telecommunications Ownership and Control (TOSCO)

2022

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The ‘internet’—familiar shorthand for information and communication technologies (ICT)—is built on a physical infrastructure owned by a variety of state and private actors, foreign and domestic, with multiple interests. It has not only driven change on a global scale; its spread also had a profound impact on the social sciences. However, our understanding of how its architecture, and especially its owners, influence its political and economic impact is still in its infancy. This paper presents the Telecommunications Ownership and Control (TOSCO) dataset on ownership of internet service providers (ISPs) that allows to recognize the internet as strategically built and used by governments and corporations. Along with a thorough discussion of the conceptualization and operationalization of ownership as a variable, the TOSCO dataset enables comparative large-N analysis of the determinants and effects of varying ownership structures and identities in the transforming context of 49 African countries, 2000–2019. We demonstrate its usefulness with descriptive statistics and regression analyses using replication data from research on the internet’s democratizing and corruption-reducing effects. In allowing for a more realistic account, TOSCO supports scholars and practitioners concerned with the determinants and effects of internet service provision, use and control in Africa and beyond.

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“…[66] and [67] evaluated AS-to-AS and AS-to-country importance similarly. Some works estimated country-to-web [28], [71] or AS-toweb [64] importance, that is, how like a country or an AS is on the routes for visiting popular websites. Routing detour is measured in [14], [28], [59], [71] and [77] found anycast traffic sometimes are routed to out-of-country PoP (Point of Presence) even when an in-country PoP is available.…”

Section: A Measurement Of Routingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Compared to the prior studies, the main contribution of this work is to offer new insights about country-to-DNS importance, which has never been investigated a priori. In addition, the number of websites and countries we select to assess the importance is significantly larger than prior works using hundreds of popular sites and few countries [28], [64], [71].…”

Section: A Measurement Of Routingmentioning

confidence: 99%

DNSWeight: Quantifying Country-Wise Importance of Domain Name System

Chang

Hao

Zhou³

et al. 2021

IEEE Access

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DNS (Domain Name System) is one fundamental Internet infrastructure related to most network activities. As a feasible tool to govern the Internet, DNS's stability and interoperability will be impacted by the countries' policies or actions along the path. Especially now that many countries have stricter control over the Internet and even sometimes "unplug" it. But there was no study to quantify the countries' impact systematically. To fill this research gap, we present DNSWeight. This new data-driven approach utilizes a large-scale DNS dataset and BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routing information to calculate the country-importance score so that a country's impact on DNS can be gauged. By applying DNSWeight on large-scale DNS and BGP datasets jointly, our study shows the importance among different countries is divided. A handful of countries show dominant significance to the current DNS ecosystem. Some countries with a history of Internet shutdowns are too influential to be ignored if they choose to break themselves from the Internet. We also examine the impact of IPv6 (IP Version 6) and reveal the "loop" phenomenon that occurs in some DNS queries. In conjunction with our findings, some discussion and suggestions are given. In summary, our study shows that DNS reliability needs to be reconsidered at the country's level.

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Few Throats to Choke: On the Current Structure of the Internet

Cited by 14 publications

References 18 publications

The Devil's in The Details

The Devil's in The Details

The political power of internet business: A comprehensive dataset of Telecommunications Ownership and Control (TOSCO)

DNSWeight: Quantifying Country-Wise Importance of Domain Name System

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