Abstract
We consider the problem of inferring IPv6 router uninterrupted system availability, or uptime, from a remote vantage point without privileged access. Uptime inference is important to broader efforts to measure and characterize the availability of critical infrastructure, provides insight into network operations, and has subtle security implications. Our approach utilizes active probes to periodically elicit IPv6 fragment identifiers from IPv6 router interfaces, and analyzes the resulting identifier time series for reboots. We demonstrate the approach’s potential by characterizing 21,539 distinct IPv6 router interfaces over a five-month period. We find evidence of clustered reboot events, popular maintenance windows, and correlation with globally visible control plane data. Our results, validated by five ASes, provide initial insight into the current state of IPv6 router availability.
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Notes
- 1.
A small fraction of the interfaces return only a small number of IDs over the experiment duration; we exclude those where \(n<20\).
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Acknowledgments
We thank Stefan Savage for the uptime idea, and to the networks that validated our inferences. This work supported by NSF grants CNS-1111445 and CNS-1111449 and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contracts N66001-2250-58231 and N66001-12-C-0130. Views and conclusions are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. government.
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Beverly, R., Luckie, M., Mosley, L., Claffy, K. (2015). Measuring and Characterizing IPv6 Router Availability. In: Mirkovic, J., Liu, Y. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8995. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15509-8_10
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