Thesis: Reducing the Visibility Gaps of the Public Internet Routing System

PhD defense: Thomas ALFROY

Team: Networks

Date & time: September 11th, 2024 at 2:00 PM at the Amphithéâtre du Collège Doctoral Européen, located at 46 Bd de la Victoire, 67000 Strasbourg.

Title: Reducing the Visibility Gaps of the Public Internet Routing System

Abstract: BGP data collection platforms as currently architected face fundamental challenges that threaten their long-term sustainability. We analyze, prototype, and evaluate a new optimization paradigm for BGP collection. Our system scales data collection with two components: analyzing redundancy between BGP updates and using it to optimize sampling of the incoming streams of BGP data. An appropriate definition of redundancy across updates depends on the analysis objective. Our contributions include: a survey, measurements, and simulations to demonstrate the limitations of current systems; a general framework and algorithms to assess and remove redundancy in BGP observations; and quantitative analysis of the benefit of our approach in terms of accuracy and coverage for several canonical BGP routing analyses such as hijack detection and topology mapping. Finally, we implement and deploy a new BGP peering collection system that automates peering expansion using our redundancy analytics, which provides a path forward for more thorough evaluation of this approach.

The jury will be composed of:

• Reviewer: Pr. Laurent Vanbever, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
• Reviewer: Pr. Oliver Holhfeld, University of Kassel, Germany
• Examiner: Pr. Cédric Bastoul, University of Strasbourg/Qualcomm, France
• Examiner: Dr. Cecilia Testart, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
• Examiner: Pr. Dario Rossi, Huawei, France
• Supervisor: Dr. Thomas Holterbach, University of Strasbourg, France
• Director: Pr. Cristel Pelsser, University of Strasbourg/UCLouvain, Belgium
• Director: Dr. Pascal Mérindol, University of Strasbourg, France