Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute: Quantifying Interdependencies of the Logical/Physical Internet topologies

We seek to quantify the impact of observed outages and evaluate the interdependencies of the logical and physical Internet topologies.

Sponsored by:
Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

Principal Investigator: kc claffy

Funding source:  2015-ST-061-CIRC01, subaward 077083-16369 Period of performance: July 1, 2017 - June 30, 2018.

Project Summary

Co-location (interconnection) infrastructures exist in every major city, supporting thousands of interconnections between networks all over the globe. These infrastructures are well provisioned and managed, but outages are expected, e.g., due to power failures, human errors, attacks, and natural disasters. In this project, we will refine our novel and lightweight methodology for detecting peering infrastructure outages. Our methodology relies on the observation that BGP communities, announced with routing updates, are an excellent source of information allowing us to pinpoint outage locations with high accuracy. Our study promises to provide a unique view of the behavior of the Internet under stress that often goes unreported.

Statement of Work


# Subtask Date Status
Task 1: Develop and document method for constructing BGP community dictionary
Deliverable: Dataset: BGP Community Dictionary Sep 2017 done
1.1 Construct initial dictionary (data set) Aug 2017 done
1.2 Contribute data set to IMPACT repository Sep 2017 done
1.3 Document method for constructing data set Sep 2017 done
Task 2: Test and evaluate method to detect peering infrastructure outages
Deliverable: Report of methodology for detecting peering infrastructure outages Dec 2017 done
2.1 Input module: Data preprocessing Jul 2017
2.2 Monitoring module: outage detection Aug 2017
2.3 Outage signal investigation Oct 2017
2.4 Data plane analysis Nov 2017
Task 3: Evaluate the results
Deliverable: Report on implications of results for critical infrastructure resilience May 2018
3.1 Analyze efficiency and coverage Jan 2018
3.2 Analyze accuracy Feb 2018
Task 4: Describe implications for critical infrastructure protection
Deliverable: Final Report Jun 2018

End Users Engaged

CAIDA is an active participant in the DHS Information Marketplace for Policy and Analysis of Cyber-risk & Trust (IMPACT) project. We will use IMPACT and the appropriate technical disclosure controls it provides to share privacy-respecting forms of the collected and produced data with vetted users of the IMPACT portal.

Technology Transition Plan

CAIDA embraces open source software licenses as an appropriate channel for technology transfer of results of our research and development efforts to benefit the public and the nation. We will make software tools from this project available with an open source license consistent with university policy.

Acknowledgment of awarding agency's support

This material is based upon work supported by the U. S. Department of Homeland Security under Grant Award Number 2015-ST-061-CIRC01. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U. S. Department of Homeland Security.

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