Re: Announcement of Experiments

[Marco Chiesa <mar.chiesa () gmail com>]

Hi all,

 We would like to thank the community for sharing both their concerns and
support.

 We have decided that we will NOT run the experiment for now.

 We would like to clarify some of the existing concerns.

Concern #1: Risks about operational disruption.
We would have only announced an IP prefix that we control and for which the
only data traffic will be the one that we generate during the experiment.

Concern #2: Reputation damage.
We did not think about this point. When talking with our testbed's contact
points, they suggested surrounding each poisoned AS with two occurrences of
the testbed ASN in the AS path. As an example, when poisoning ASN_1 and
ASN_2, our AS path would have looked like <ORIGIN_ASN --- ASN_1 ---
ORIGIN_ASN ---  ASN_2 --- ORIGIN_ASN>. In this way, any peering inference
systems would only infer one relationship with ORIGIN_ASN, which can easily
be filtered.

Concern #3: Poisoning usage.
As it was mentioned in a previous email, AS path poisoning can be used for
steering inbound traffic away from some networks. In our experiment, this
would have meant that our generated traffic would have not traversed the
poisoned AS networks. There was a recent in-depth study on the level of
effectiveness of poisoning for inbound traffic steering:
https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/24240-paper.pdf .

Best regards,
Marco

On Tue, 3 May 2022 at 00:22, Randy Bush <randy () psg com> wrote:

> hi adam,
>
> you are correct, it will affect research based on as_path data from the
> ris/rv collectors etc.  which is why i think these researchers were kind
> to warn us so we can remove data for those prefixes from in any
> measurements betting on as_path which might be so sensitive so as to be
> effected.
>
> but then, removing PEERING testbed prefix data (which these are) from
> your experiments is probably wise in general.  you would be measuring
> other researchers, not the 'normal' (whatever the heck that is:)
> internet.
>
> as a point of amusement, for a month or so in 2008 3130 had an
> out-degree of approximately the entire as set.  and no packets were
> harmed.
>
> [ credit where due department: as we said in the 2009 paper, i think it
>   was lorenzo who first used as_path poisoning in a measurement study. ]
>
> alongside ris and/or rv, we night have a registry of both accidental and
> intentional known anomalies.
>
> ran3970dy