Abstract
Network operators often apply policy-based traffic filtering at the egress of edge networks. These policies can be detected by performing active measurements; however, doing so involves instrumenting every network one wishes to study. We investigate a methodology for detecting policy-based service-level traffic filtering from passive observation of traffic markers within darknets. Such markers represent traffic we expect to arrive and, therefore, whose absence is suggestive of network filtering. We study the approach with data from five large darknets over the course of one week. While we show the approach has utility to expose filtering in some cases, there are also limits to the methodology.
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Notes
- 1.
Five is a somewhat arbitrary choice that weeds out /24 address blocks that send exceedingly little traffic for illustrative purposes.
- 2.
There are more Conficker infected hosts in some of the routed blocks and ASes, however, we truncate the plot at 255 for comparison with /24 blocks.
- 3.
We included UDP in our analysis, but elide it from this discussion due to space constraints and its similarity with the TCP results.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Christian Kreibich for the Netalyzr data, Phillip Porras for the Conficker sinkhole data, and Vern Paxson for comments on an earlier draft. This work is sponsored by NSF grants CNS-1213157, CNS-1237265, CNS-1505790 and CNS-1111699.
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Sargent, M., Czyz, J., Allman, M., Bailey, M. (2015). On the Power and Limitations of Detecting Network Filtering via Passive Observation. In: Mirkovic, J., Liu, Y. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8995. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15509-8_13
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