Randy's Work Blog

Andreas Reuter, Randy Bush, Italo Cunha, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Thomas C. Schmidt, Matthias Wählisch; Towards a Rigorous Methodology for Measuring Adoption of RPKI Route Validation and Filtering; CCR July 2018

A proposal to improve routing security—Route Origin Authorization (ROA)—has been standardized. A ROA specifies which network is allowed to announce a set of Internet destinations. While some networks now specify ROAs, little is known about whether other networks check routes they receive against these ROAs, a process known as Route Origin Validation (ROV). Which networks blindly accept invalid routes? Which reject them outright? Which de-preference them if alternatives exist?

Recent analysis attempts to use uncontrolled experiments to characterize ROV adoption by comparing valid routes and invalid routes. However, we argue that gaining a solid understanding of ROV adoption is impossible using currently available data sets and techniques. Instead, we devise a verifiable methodology of controlled experiments for measuring ROV. Our measurements suggest that, although some ISPs are not observed using invalid routes in uncontrolled experiments, they are actually using different routes for (non-security) traffic engineering purposes, without performing ROV. We conclude with presenting three AS that do implement ROV as confirmed by the operators.

George Michaelson, Matthew Roughan, Jonathan Tuke, Matt P. Wand, and Randy Bush; Rasch analysis of HTTPS reachability; IFIP Networking 2018 Zurich, Switzerland, May 14-16, 2018

The use of HTTPS as the only means to connect to web servers is increasing. It is being pushed from both sides: from the bottom up by client distributions and plugins, and from the top down by organisations such as Google. However, there are potential technical hurdles that might lock some clients out of the modern web. This paper seeks to measure and precisely quantify those hurdles in the wild. More than three million measurements provide statistically significant evidence of degradation. We show this through statistical techniques, in particular Rasch analysis, which also shows that various factors influence the problem ranging from the client’s browser, to their locale.