Thanks to technology, what almost anybody can do has been multiplied a thousandfold, and our moral understanding about what we ought to do hasn't kept pace. ... You can lay minefields, smuggle nuclear weapons in suitcases, make nerve gas, and drop "smart bombs" with pinpoint accuracy. Also, you can arrange to have a hundred dollars a month automatically sent from your bank account to provide education for ten girls in an Islamic country who otherwise would not learn to read and write .... You can use the Internet to organize citizen monitoring of environmental hazards, or to check the honesty and performance of government officials-or to spy on your neighbors. Now, what ought we to do?-DANIEL DENNETT, 2006 IN: BREAKING THE SPELL. vi Gratus animus est una virtus non solum maxima, sed etiam mater virtutum omnium reliquarum.

Important steps have been taken in the recent years towards evaluating the performance of Web services for network management. Due to the lack of specific standards for Web services-based management, previous evaluations have been carried out measuring only the performance of SOAP (the basic Web services protocol) running in network management environments. While the conclusions of the papers published so far indicate the feasibility of employing Web services for network management, there is no evidence that these conclusions also hold for solutions developed according to recent Web services management standards. In this paper we go a step further and present the results of a set of experiments carried out in order to compare the specifications OASIS Management Using Web Services (MUWS) and DMTF Web Services for Management (WS-Management) against the de facto network management standard, i.e., the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). The performance metrics investigated were network usage, response time, and CPU usage.

Policy makers in regions such as Europe are increasingly concerned about the trustworthiness and sovereignty of the foundations of their digital economy, because it often depends on systems operated or manufactured elsewhere. To help curb this problem, we propose the novel notion of a responsible Internet, which provides higher degrees of trust and sovereignty for critical service providers (e.g., power grids) and all kinds of other users by improving the transparency, accountability, and controllability of the Internet at the network-level. A responsible Internet accomplishes this through two new distributed and decentralized systems. The first is the Network Inspection Plane (NIP), which enables users to request measurement-based descriptions of the chains of network operators (e.g., ISPs and DNS and cloud providers) that handle their data flows or could potentially handle them, including the relationships between them and the properties of these operators. The second is the Network Control Plane (NCP), which allows users to specify how they expect the Internet infrastructure to handle their data (e.g., in terms of the security attributes that they expect chains of network operators to have) based on the insights they gained from the NIP. We discuss research directions and starting points to realize a responsible Internet by combining three currently largely disjoint research areas: large-scale measurements (for the NIP), open source-based programmable networks (for the NCP), and policy making (POL) based on the NIP and driving the NCP. We believe that a responsible Internet is the next stage in the evolution of the Internet and that the concept is useful for clean slate Internet systems as well.

No abstract

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks continue to be a major threat on the Internet today. DDoS attacks overwhelm target services with requests or other traffic, causing requests from legitimate users to be shut out. A common defense against DDoS is to replicate a service in multiple physical locations/sites. If all sites announce a common prefix, BGP will associate users around the Internet with a nearby site, defining the catchment of that site. Anycast defends against DDoS both by increasing aggregate capacity across many sites, and allowing each site's catchment to contain attack traffic, leaving other sites unaffected. IP anycast is widely used by commercial CDNs and for essential infrastructure such as DNS, but there is little evaluation of anycast under stress. This paper provides the first evaluation of several IP anycast services under stress with public data. Our subject is the Internet's Root Domain Name Service, made up of 13 independently designed services ("letters", 11 with IP anycast) running at more than 500 sites. Many of these services were stressed by sustained traffic at 100× normal load on Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, 2015. We use public data for most of our analysis to examine how different services respond to stress, and identify two policies: sites may absorb attack traffic, containing the damage but reducing service to some users, or they may withdraw routes to shift both good and bad traffic to other sites. We study how these deployment policies resulted in different levels of service to different users during the events. We also show evidence of collateral damage on other services located near the attacks.