Oakland'11 papers

At this year's IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy we presented two papers.

The first presents an extensive measurement study our team of 15 researchers, postdocs and graduate students at UCSD and ICSI has worked on for two years. It expands the analysis of the spam value chain into the financial domain, illuminates the affiliate program landscape for pharmaceuticals, replica goods, and software, and identifies three banks that together receive the credit card transactions of 95% of the spam we observe.

• K. Levchenko, A. Pitsillidis, N. Chachra, B. Enright, M. Felegyhazi, C. Grier, T. Halvorson, C. Kanich, C. Kreibich, H. Liu, D. McCoy, N. Weaver, V. Paxson, G. M. Voelker, and S. Savage. Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2011, Oakland, USA.

The second paper presents Monarch, a real-time system that crawls URLs as they are submitted to web services and determines whether the URLs direct to spam. The paper evaluates the fundamental challenges that arise due to the diversity of web service spam. Monarch could protect a service such as Twitter—which needs to process 15 million URLs/day—for a bit under $800/day.

• K. Thomas, C. Grier, J. Ma, V. Paxson and D. Song. Monarch: Providing Real-Time URL Spam Filtering as a Service. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2011, Oakland, USA.

SIGCOMM awards

ACM has awarded this year's SIGCOMM award to Vern Paxson, for his seminal contributions to the fields of Internet measurement and Internet security, and for distinguished leadership and service to the Internet community.

SIGCOMM's Test-Of-Time Award recognizes papers published at least ten years ago that have turned out to make significant contributions to the field of networking. This year one of the two papers chosen is "A Scalable Content-addressable Network" which appeared in SIGCOMM 2001 and is authored by current and past ICSI researchers Sylvia Ratnasamy, Paul Francis, Mark Handley, Richard Karp and Scott Shenker.

Bro Internship

The Bro project is looking for an intern this summer as well.

Summer Internships

The Networking Group is now accepting applications for Summer 2011 internships. Applicants should be Ph.D. students with a solid research background in networking and/or security. To apply, send a resume to summer@icir.org, and arrange for a letter of reference to be sent to that address too. The deadline for applications is March 18, 2011.

Characterizing Scanning Behavior

Last week, Tom Dooner and Brian Stack, two undergraduates we're working with at Case Western Reserve University, presented a poster at Case's Intersections: SOURCE Undergraduate Symposium and Poster Session. The work presented is a preliminary characterization of scanning patterns as observed over 12+ years at LBNL. You can view the poster here.

Followup: Tom and Brian's poster won second place among posters from the College of Engineering at this event. Congrats!

IMC'10 Paper on Illuminating Edge Networks

Earlier this month we presented the ICSI Netalyzr at the Internet Measurement Conference in Melbourne, Australia. The Netalyzr is a public edge network measurement and debugging service that evaluates the functionality provided by people's Internet connectivity. Its tests include outbound port filtering, hidden in-network HTTP caches, DNS manipulations, NAT behavior, path MTU issues, access-modem buffer capacity, and growing IPv6 support and performance. The paper is available here:

• Christian Kreibich, Nicholas Weaver, Boris Nechaev, and Vern Paxson. Netalyzr: Illuminating The Edge Network. Internet Measurement Conference, 2010, Melbourne, Australia. (bib)

The Netalyzr has been one of our major research efforts over the past two years, and we're thrilled by the popularity it has gained since we launched it—to date, Netalyzr has collected 160,000 sessions from 6,800 different organisations in 190 countries: The study is ongoing, so visit the Netalyzr website and run it yourself!

Paper on Emergency Notification

We recently published a paper that discusses a special-purpose social network for communicating during an wide-scale emergency situation (e.g., an earthquake).

• Mark Allman. On Building Special-Purpose Social Networks for Emergency Communication. ACM Computer Communication Review, 40(5), October 2010.

The CCR public review of the paper is also available here.