Opportunities and Challenges of Ad-based Measurements from the Edge of the Network

Abstract

For many years, the research community, practitioners, and regulators have used myriad methods and tools to understand the complex structure and behavior of ISPs from the edge of the network. Unfortunately, the nature of these techniques forces the researcher to find a balance between ISP-coverage, user scale, and accuracy. In this paper we present AdTag, a network measurement paradigm that leverages the opportunistic nature of online targeted advertising to measure the Internet from the edge of the network. We discuss and formalize AdTag's design space-including technical, ethical, deployability and economic factors-and its potential to analyze a wide spectrum of Internet connectivity aspects from the browser. We run several experiments to demonstrate that AdTag can be tailored towards geographic and devicebased user groups, finding also several challenges to be faced in order to maximize the number of samples. In a 7-day campaign, AdTag could access more than 20K ISPs at a global scale (185 countries) using millions of edge nodes.

Measuring the Global Recursive DNS Infrastructure: A View From the Edge

“…As we can see in Table 1, all previous DNS studies used methods that fall short at meeting simultaneously the geographical and temporal scope, reproducibility, and openness requirements. To overcome the limitations of the state-ofthe-art, we adapt AdTag [10], a flexible JavaScript-based methodology to measure the global infrastructure of recursive DNS resolvers and users' DNS choices at a global scale and in a short timescale. Our web-based measurement method leverages a purpose-built lightweight JavaScript code which probes the configured recursive DNS resolver from the browser.…”

“…2) Our IP geolocation effort is subject to the Maxmind's geo-mapping accuracy, which previous studies have reported as good enough at the country granularity for the majority of the cases [22]. We have also considered RIPE IPmap, 10 but the response time and coverage of this service do not meet our requirements. 3) Our NS records the public IP address of the recursive resolver and end user connecting, but it only supports IPv4.…”

“…In this paper, we adapt AdTag [10], an open, lightweight, and flexible measurement methodology to overcome the limitations found in previous DNS measurement methods. For that, we use the rich suite of networking APIs and capabilities offered by modern browsers to develop JavaScript-based DNS measurement scripts that trigger a DNS resolution process with an authoritative Name Server (NS) under our control.…”

An Ad-Driven Measurement Technique for Monitoring the Browser Marketplace

“…This will serve to fix identified biases in the data sample, but also to conduct specific analysis of the browser market landscape such as analyze the market share for a particular demographic group (based on age and/or sex), analyze the presence of insecure browser versions and identify its associated IPs, etc; (iii) it should guarantee that each browser instance represents a single data sample in the collected dataset. To achieve these goals, we propose the utilization of AdTag [10], and active measurements platform, contrary to the passive measurements used so far. In particular, our approach relies on the online advertising ecosystem.…”

“…In this paper, we propose the use of AdTag [10], an active measurement platform leveraging display ads as measurement vantage points, to monitor the browser market landscape. This approach overcomes the described limitations of traditional passive methodologies and offers the three main functional requirements mentioned above: scalability, accessibility and targeting capabilities.…”