An Open Platform to Teach How the Internet Practically Works

Holterbach, Thomas; Bü, Tobias; Rellstab, Tino; Vanbever, Laurent

doi:10.1145/3402413.3402420

Cited by 11 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…To evaluate Oscilloscope, we need an environment emulating • Multiple ASes with BGP connectivity; • Realistic BGP relationships between ASes; • Inter-domain links with realistic delays; • Prefix advertisements and traffic generation from end hosts. We use the mini-Internet platform [24] as a basis for our emulation. The mini-Internet runs each device (e.g., router, host) in its own Docker container and links them together to enable Internet-like connectivity.…”

Section: Mini-internet Emulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Oscilloscope: Detecting BGP Hijacks in the Data Plane

Bühler¹,

Milolidakis²,

Jacob³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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The lack of security of the Internet routing protocol (BGP) has allowed attackers to divert Internet traffic and consequently perpetrate service disruptions, monetary frauds, and even citizen surveillance for decades. State-of-the-art defenses rely on geo-distributed BGP monitors to detect rogue BGP announcements. As we show, though, attackers can easily evade detection by engineering their announcements.This paper presents Oscilloscope, an approach to accurately detect BGP hijacks by relying on real-time traffic analysis. As hijacks inevitably change the characteristics of the diverted traffic, the key idea is to track these changes in real time and flag them. The main challenge is that "normal" Internet events (e.g., network reconfigurations, link failures, load balancing) also change the underlying traffic characteristics -and they are way more frequent than hijacks. Naive traffic analyses would hence lead to too many false positives.We observe that hijacks typically target a subset of the prefixes announced by Internet service providers and only divert a subset of their traffic. In contrast, normal events lead to more uniform changes across prefixes and traffic. Oscilloscope uses this observation to filter out non-hijack events by checking whether they affect multiple related prefixes or not.Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that Oscilloscope quickly and accurately detects hijacks in realistic traffic traces containing hundreds of events.

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Section: Mini-internet Emulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Oscilloscope: Detecting BGP Hijacks in the Data Plane

Bühler¹,

Milolidakis²,

Jacob³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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“…Mini-internet [13] is a project that also targets education. The main goal of the project is to build a large network with multiple autonomous systems and internet exchanges to enable students to understand Internet operations alongside their pitfalls.…”

Section: Other Labsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, we can install additional software (such as routing software) inside the containers, so the emulated nodes can communicate with one another. This is the approach taken by Mini-Internet [13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The SEED Internet Emulator and Its Applications in Cybersecurity Education

Du¹,

Honghao²

2022

Preprint

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In cybersecurity courses, it is quite challenging to do hands-on activities that involve many components of the Internet, such as bringing down the Internet, attacking a blockchain, etc. To solve this problem, we have developed an open-source Internet Emulator, which is a Python library, consisting of the classes for each essential element of the Internet, including autonomous system, network, host, router, BGP router, Internet exchange, etc. It also includes the classes for a variety of services, including Web server, DNS, Botnet, Darknet, Blockchain, and more are being developed. Using these classes, users can construct a mini-Internet to emulate the real-world Internet. Although it is small, it has all the essential elements of the real Internet. The construction is compiled into Docker container files, and the emulation is executed by Docker on a single machine, or on multiple cloud machines.With this Internet Emulator, we can develop a variety of handson activities for cybersecurity courses, including BGP prefix hijacking, attacks on smart contract, using Darknet to achieve anonymity, launching Botnet and ransomware attacks, etc. While the emulator was initially developed for cybersecurity courses, it can also be used for network courses, for students to learn how the Internet technologies work, such as routing, BGP, IP Anycast, and DNS. Many other interesting network technologies can also be deployed on the emulator, such as content delivery network and software-defined network. This is an open-source project: https://github.com/seedlabs/seed-emulator.

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“…Many experimental facilities and tools have been developed to aid researchers in carrying out replicable networking studies [57,71]. Testbeds such as Emu-Lab [79] and FlexLab [63], as well as emulation tools such as MiniNet [33] and the mini-Internet [34], enable the creation of artificial network conditions using a given specification or passively-observed traffic. Emulated conditions offer a more controlled environment than experiments with real-world traffic (e.g., by transmitting data over the Internet [11,22], cloud [15,26], or wireless interfaces [2,31,52]).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

[Tool] Designing Replicable Networking Experiments With Triscale

Jacob¹,

Zimmerling²,

Boano³

et al. 2021

Journal of Systems Research

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Many research fields are facing an ongoing reproducibility crisis. Networking and systems are no exception. While there are efforts towards open networking testbeds and datasets, this paper sheds light on another pressing issue that hinders reproducibility-lack of statistical foundation in the evaluation of many networking papers. Questions such as "how many runs should the experiments perform" and "how long for each run" are crucial, especially under high performance variability inherent to networked systems. All reviewers remark on the contribution of the paper: a first step towards a concrete methodology for networking performance evaluation that offers quantifiable confidence and reproducibility, through synthesizing formal statistical frameworks and networking domain-specific concepts.

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An Open Platform to Teach How the Internet Practically Works

Cited by 11 publications

References 3 publications

Oscilloscope: Detecting BGP Hijacks in the Data Plane

Oscilloscope: Detecting BGP Hijacks in the Data Plane

The SEED Internet Emulator and Its Applications in Cybersecurity Education

[Tool] Designing Replicable Networking Experiments With Triscale

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