Resolving IP aliases with prespecified timestamps

  • Authors:

  • Justine Sherry;Ethan Katz-Bassett;Mary Pimenova;Harsha V. Madhyastha;Thomas Anderson;Arvind Krishnamurthy

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Washington, Seattle, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, USA;UC San Diego, La Jolla, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, USA

  • Venue:
  • IMC '10 Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Operators and researchers want accurate router-level views of the Internet for purposes including troubleshooting and modeling. However, tools such as traceroute return IP addresses. Because routers may have dozens of IP addresses, or aliases, multiple measurements may return different addresses, obscuring whether they represent the same machine. While many techniques exist to address this issue by identifying some IP aliases, these techniques, even in combination, find only a subset of alias pairs. To improve this state, we design and evaluate a new alias resolution technique using the IP prespecified timestamp option. This option allows a sender to request timestamp val- ues from multiple IP addresses in the same probe. By careful arrangement of these IP addresses, we show that we can infer aliases in many cases. In this paper, we conduct a measurement study of how many routers support IP timestamps, demonstrating that enough honor the option to base our technique on it. Using our technique, and compared to the most accurate alias information available, we find that 94.7% of the aliases identified by our technique are true positives. Further, we show that our IP timestamp-based technique complements existing alias resolution techniques, providing significant gains by discovering previously unidentifiable aliases.