Abstract
Traditional methods of conducting measurements to end hosts require sending unexpected packets to measurement targets. Although existing techniques can ascertain end host characteristics accurately, their use in large-scale measurement studies is hindered by the fact that unexpected traffic can trigger alarms in common intrusion detection systems, often resulting in complaints from administrators. We describe BitProbes, a measurement system that works around this challenge. By coordinated participation in the popular peer-to-peer BitTorrent system, BitProbes is able to unobtrusively measure bandwidth capacity, latency, and topology information for ~500,000 end hosts per week from only eight vantage points at the University of Washington. To date, our measurements have not generated a single complaint in spite of their wide coverage.
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Isdal, T., Piatek, M., Krishnamurthy, A., Anderson, T. (2007). Leveraging BitTorrent for End Host Measurements. In: Uhlig, S., Papagiannaki, K., Bonaventure, O. (eds) Passive and Active Network Measurement. PAM 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4427. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71617-4_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71617-4_4
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