Network Systems Group Princeton University   Information Plane

Project Goals

The goal of this project is to architect and demonstrate an information plane: a distributed system running throughout the network that collects, stores, propagates, aggregates, analyzes and reacts to observations about the network's behavior. An information plane can be used to manage networks and network services; detect and defend against anomalies; and diagnose and recover from failures.

Results

We have made a case for an information plane, and described its basic architecture; a prototype, called Sophia, runs on PlanetLab [HotNets 2003]. Sophia consists of a distributed set of sensors that report data about aspects of the system; a declarative programming environment, also distributed, that evaluates logic statements about the system; and a set of actuators that perform local actions.

We are monitoring dark (unassigned) IP addresses in an effort to characterize background radiation, non-productive traffic that includes flooding backscatter, scans for vulnerabilities, warms, and misconfigurations [IMC 2004].

We have built a tool that anonymizes Internet packet traces, making it possible to share such traces with the research community without sacrificing privacy. The tool provides high-level language support that allows users to write scripts that anonymize headers and payloads, as well as perform application-level transformations. [SIGCOMM 2003].

We have built a fault diagnosis tool, called PlanetSeer, that passively monitors traffic generated by wide-area services (e.g., a CDN or P2P sevice), and when it detects anomalous network behavior, actively probes the netowrk from multiple nodes to quantify and characterize the scope of the anomaly [OSDI 2004].

We have investigated the techniques used for Internet mapping and found that they can be sensitive to even small numbers of DNS misnamings. These problems can lead to erroneous derivations of network size, connectivity, path inflation, etc. [USENIX 2006].

People

Vivek S. Pai
Ruoming Pang
Vern Paxson
Larry Peterson
Timothy Roscoe
Randy Wang
Mike Wawrzoniak
Chi Zhang
Ming Zhang