SCS Seminar Talk: Alberto Dainotti

TITLE: Detecting and Visualizing Internet Failures: From Measurements to Streaming Analytics

ABSTRACT:

Our society's dependence on the internet is unquestioned. Yet our ability to manage the risks associated with relying on the proper functioning of the internet's core infrastructure is hindered by a poor understanding of how it can fail. For example, we lack a thorough understanding of when/where/how/why large connectivity failures happen; or we rely on a global routing system that is extremely vulnerable and we do not know to what extent it is exploited, by whom, and for what purposes. My research tries to address these questions by acquiring empirical evidence (e.g., on network status and misuse) on a global scale and longitudinally. 

 In this talk I will first describe an approach I developed to gather unprecedented insight into episodes of connectivity disruption, which is based on two intuitions: the opportunity to extract (connectivity liveness) "signals" from so-called "Internet background noise" traffic and the benefit of combining different types of control-plane and data-plane measurements.  I then discuss how this inspired me to build a system (IODA,ioda.caida.org) to monitor the Internet for large-scale connectivity outages. IODA can detect Internet outages worldwide within minutes, continuously updating and monitoring hundreds of thousands of time series. IODA serves both as a research testbed and as a public service that provides automatically generated alerts and visualizations. This effort has enabled further research in multiple directions, facilitated interdisciplinary collaborations, and resulted in the engagement of industry, government, and civil society. 

 I will conclude my talk by briefly discussing my other ongoing and future research efforts to understand and remediate Internet infrastructural issues and weaknesses.

BIO:

Alberto Dainotti is an associate research scientist at CAIDA, the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis at University of California, San Diego. His research is at the intersection of internet measurement, data science, and internet security with a focus on understanding and improving internet infrastructure security and reliability. He has received the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference Distinguished Paper Award, two IRTF Applied Networking Research Prizes, and the Best of ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review award. Dainotti received his Ph.D. in computer engineering and systems at University of Napoli “Federico II,” Italy.  

Join the talk here: https://bluejeans.com/640828498