Routing and Addressing

CAIDA's current research in routing focuses on applying key theoretical results in distributed computation theory to the development of protocols that will address issues of future scalability. CAIDA also analyzes available Internet addressing and routing data in support of policy discussions regarding Internet Identifier Consumption including IPv4 address exhaustion, allocations, concentration of address ownership, and IPv6 adoption.

Topology

CAIDA's topology research includes three areas: Macroscopic Topology Measurements, AS Rank Topology Analysis of the observable ISP hierarchy, and Topology Modeling for routing research.

DNS

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a critical infrastructural component of the Internet. Our DNS research projects aim to improve the integrity of DNS monitoring and protection.

Security

Security research at CAIDA includes analysis of network-based attacks e.g. denial-of-service attacks, data hosting and provision, and measurement and statistical analysis of the trends and impact that certain Internet worms and viruses have on the global network infrastructure. We hope to develop meaningful and up-to-date quantitative characterizations of attack activity and to produce fundamental insights into the nature of malicious behavior on the Internet and consequently the best directions for mitigating that behavior.

Recently we have also collaborated with the MIT ANA Spoofer project to assess macroscopic trends in IPv4 source address filtering, e.g., of private or bogon addresses, which should not be exiting appropriately configured networks.

Traffic Analysis

CAIDA's traffic analysis research includes more historical workload traffic studies. Workload measurements involve the collection of traffic information from a point within a network, e.g., data collected by a router or switch or by an independent device passively monitoring traffic as it traverses a network link.

Policy and Economics

Our research has led us to realize that issues of economics, ownership, and trust create obstacles to progress on most of the top problems of the Internet. Therefore, we added Internet policy and economics to the list of our research efforts.

Visualization

Driven by a desire for a better understanding of the Internet, CAIDA develops new visualization techniques to display Internet data.

Past Research

Since its inception in 1997, CAIDA has conducted research and analysis in many aspects of Internet engineering. This page provides references to CAIDA's past research and analysis projects, case studies, catalogs, surveys, and reports.

Institutional Review Board (IRB) Approval Process

In compliance with federal, state and University policies regarding experimentation involving human subjects, CAIDA submitted and has had approved an application for a review of our research protocol by the federally registered campus Institutional Review Board (IRB). The application for this IRB approval process covered the general traffic and other data analysis work we have done for the last 10 years, not including any research involving payload (which we define as anything past the TCP/IP header). Although we expected it to go to a full panel review, our application was given expedited review and received approval within 10 days.