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As predicted, new tools to thwart traffic shaping by telcos and cablecos
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2008 08:04:11 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks) Date: February 21, 2008 1:06:35 PM EST To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com>Subject: [Dewayne-Net] As predicted, new tools to thwart traffic shaping by telcos and cablecos
[Note: This item comes from Bill St. Arnaud's list. DLH] For more information on this item please visit my blog at http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/ or http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com ------------------------------------------- [Will the telecos and cablecos ever learn? Implementing traffic shapingtools and trying to block BitTorrent and other applications will eventually backfire. Hackers are already working on tools to thwart such attempts. No one questions that carriers have the right to traffic manage their network. But using secretive techniques without informing users will guarantee the carriers will be saddled with some sort of network neutrality legislation.
Instead they should be focusing on traffic engineering techniques thatenhance the users P2P experience by establishing BitTorrent supernodes etc. Thankfully a consortium of ISPs and P2P companies had been created to come
up with such solutions.--BSA] [From a posting by Lauren Weinstein of NNSquad As predicted, P2P extensions to thwart ISP "traffic shaping" and "RST injections" are in development. We can assume that ISPs will attempt to deploy countermeasures, then the P2P folks will ratchet up another level, and ... well, we may well end up with the Internet version of the Cold War's wasteful and dangerous Mutally Assured Destruction (MAD). There's gotta be a better way, folks. "The goal of this new type of encryption (or obfuscation) is to prevent ISPs from blocking or disrupting BitTorrent traffic connections that span between the receiver of a tracker response and any peer IP-port appearing in that tracker response, according tothe proposal.
This extension directly addresses a known attack on the BitTorrent protocol performed by some deployed network hardware."
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-devs-introduce-comcast-busting- encryption-080215/ [Thanks to Matt Petach for these notes from NANOG] 2008.02.18 Lightning talk #1 Laird Popkin, Pando networks Doug Pasko, Verizon networks P4P: ISPs and P2P DCIA, distributed computing industry association, P2P and ISPs P2P market is maturing digital content delivery is where things are heading; content people are excited about p2p as disruptive way to distribute content. BBC doing production quality P2P traffic; rapidly we're seeing huge changes, production people are seeing good HD rollout. Nascent P2P market pre 2007 Now, P2P is become a key part of the portfolio for content delivery P2P bandwidth usage cachelogic slide, a bit dated, with explosion of youtube, the ratio is sliding again the other way, but it's still high. Bandwidth battle ISPs address P2P upgrade network deploy p2p caching terminate user rate limit p2p traffic P2P countermeasures use random ports Fundamental problem; our usual models for managing traffic don't apply anymore. It's very dynamic, moves all over the place. DCIA has P4P working group, goal is to get ISPs working with the p2p community, to allow shared control of the infrastructure. Make tracking infrastructure smarter. Partnership Pando, Verizon, has a unch of other members. There's companies in the core working group, and many more observing. Goal is it design framework to allow ISPs and P2P networks to guide connectivity to optimize traffic flows, provide better performance and reduce network impact. P2P alone doesn't understand topology, and has no idea of cost models and peering relationships. So, goal is to blend business requirements together with network topology. Reduce hop count, for example. Want an industry solution to arrive before a regulatory pressure comes into play. Drive the solution to be carrier grade, rather than ad-hoc solutions. P2P applications with P4P benefits better performance, faster downloads less impact on ISPs results in fewer restrictions P4P enables more efficient delivery. CDN model (central pushes, managed locations) P2P, more chaotic, no central locations, P2P+P4P, knowledge of ISP infrastructure, can form adjacencies among local clients as much as possible. Traditional looking network management, but pushed to network layer. P4P goals share topology in a flexible, controlled way; sanitized, generalized, summarized set of information, with privacy protections in place; no customer or user information out, without security concerns. Need to be flexibile to be usable across many P2P applications and architectures (trackers, trackerless) Needs to be easy to implement, want it to be an open standard; any ISP/P2P can implement it. P4P architecture slide P2P clients talk to Ptracker to figure out who to talk to; Ptracker talks to Itracker to get guidance on which peers to connect to which; so peers get told to connect to nearby peers. It's a joint optimization problem; minimize utilization by P2P, while maximizing download performance.At the end of this, goal is customer to have a better experience; customer
gets to be happier. Data exchanged in P4P; network maps go into Itracker, provides a weight matrix between locations without giving topology away. Each PID has IP 'prefix' associated with it in the matrix, has percentage weighting of how heavily people in one POP should connect to others. Ran simulations on Verizon and Telefonica networks. Zero dollars for the ISPs, using Yale modelling, shows huge reduction in hop counts, cutting down long haul drastically. Maps to direct dollar savings. Results also good for P2P, shorter download times, with 50% to 80% increases in download speeds and reductions in download time. This isn't even using caching yet. P4PWG is free to join monthly calls mailing list field test underway mission is to improve Marty Lafferty (marty () dcia org) Laird (laird () pando com) Doug (doug.pasko () verizon com) Q: interface, mathematical model; why not have a model where you ask the ISP for a given prefix, and get back weighting. But the communication volume between Ptracker and Itracker was too large for that to work well; needed chatter for every client that connected. The map was moved down into the Ptracker so it can do the mapping faster as in-memory operation, even in the face of thousands of mappings per second. The architecture here is one proof of concept test; if there's better designs, please step forward and talk to the group; goal is to validate the basic ideathat localizing traffic reduces traffic and improves performance. They're
proving out, and then will start out the Danny Mcphereson, when you do optimization, you will end up with higher peak rates within the LAN or within the POP; p2p isn't a big part of intradomain traffic, as opposed with localized traffic, where it's 80-90% of the traffic. What verizon has seen is that huge amounts of P2P traffic is crossing peering links. What about Net Neutrality side, and what they might be contributing in terms of clue factor to that issue? It's definitely getting attention; but if they can stem the vertical line, and make it more reasonable, should help carriers manage their growth pressures better. Are they providing technical contributions to the FCC, etc.? DCIA is sending papers to the FCC, and is trying to make sure that voices are being heard on related issues as well.Q: Bill Norton, do the p2p protocols try to infer any topological data via
ping tests, hop counts, etc.? Some do try; others use random peer connections; others try to reverse engineer network via traceroutes. One attempts to use cross-ISP links as much as possible, avoids internal ISPconnections as much as possible. P4P is addition to existing P2P networks; so this information can be used by the network for whatever information the
P2P network determines its goal is. Is there any motivation from thelast-mile ISP to make them look much less attractive? It seems to actually just shift the balance, without altering the actual traffic volume; it makes
it more localized, without reducing or increasing the overall level. How are they figuring on distributing this information from the Itracker to the Ptracker? Will it be via a BGP feed? If there's a central tracker, the central tracker will get the map information; for distributed P2P networks, there's no good answer yet; each peer asks Itracker for guidance, but would put heavy load on the Itracker. If everyone participates, it'll be like a global, offline IGP with anonymized data; it's definitely a challenge, but it's information sharing with a benefit. Jeff--what stops someone from getting onto a trackerbox, and maybe changing the mapping to shift all traffic against one client,
to DoS them? This is aimed as guidance; isn't aimed to be the absoluteoverride. application will still have some intelligence built in. Goal will
be to try to secure the data exchange and updates to some degree. ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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