IP: Researchers probe Net's 'dark address space'

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
>
>
>
> Researchers probe Net's 'dark address space'
> By Kevin Poulsen
> Posted: 15/11/2001 at 02:30 GMT
> <http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/22850.html>
>
> Broadband customers and US military systems are the most common victims of 
> an online phenomenon researchers have dubbed "dark address space," which 
> leaves some 100 million hosts completely unreachable from portions of the 
> Internet.
>
> For a variety of reasons ranging from contract disputes among network 
> operators to simple router mis-configuration, over five percent of the 
> Internet's routable address space lacks global connectivity, according to 
> the results of a three-year study by researchers at Massachusetts-based 
> Arbor Networks, to be released Tuesday.
>
> "Popular belief holds that the Internet represents a completely connected 
> graph," says Craig Labovitz, Arbor Networks' director of network 
> architecture. "It turns out that's just not true."
>
> Anecdotal evidence has long hinted at the existence of dark address space, 
> but the researchers shed light on the subject by continuously gathering 
> and analyzing core routing tables for three years. In the end, they found 
> that for much of the Internet, the shortest path between two points 
> doesn't exist.
>
> The most common factors contributing to dark address space: aggressive 
> route filtering by network operators seeking to ease the load on 
> equipment, and accidental mis-configuration. US military sites frequently 
> fall into the shadow zone because they often occupy neglected 'Milnet' 
> address blocks dating back to the Internet's stone age. Why cable modem 
> customers also top the list remains one of the unsolved mysteries in the 
> project, says Labovitz, who describes the research findings as preliminary.
>
> Murky Crime
> Despite the large number of hosts that fall into the partitioned space, 
> the phenomenon is generally not noticeable to average Internet users 
> because most Netizens only use a tiny portion of the Net. "Most people 
> access five or ten web sites," Labovitz says.
>
> The study was conducted by Labovitz, Michael Bailey and Abha Ahuja.
>
> <snip>


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