Revealing Middlebox Interference with Tracebox
Tue, 08/27/2013 - 17:20 by Gregory Detal
Abstract
Middleboxes such as firewalls, NAT, proxies, or Deep Packet Inspection play an
increasingly important role in various types of IP networks, including
enterprise and cellular networks. Recent studies have shed the light on their
impact on real traffic and the complexity of managing them. Network operators
and researchers have few tools to understand the impact of those boxes on any
path. In this paper, we propose tracebox, an extension to the widely used
traceroute tool, that is capable of detecting various types of middlebox
interference over almost any path. tracebox sends IP packets containing TCP
segments with different TTL values and analyses the packet encapsulated in the
returned ICMP messages. Further, as recent routers quote, in the ICMP message,
the entire IP packet that they received, tracebox is able to detect any
modification performed by upstream middleboxes. In addition, tracebox can often
pinpoint the network hop where the middlebox interference occurs. We evaluate
tracebox with measurements performed on PlanetLab nodes. Our analysis reveals
various types of middleboxes that were not expected on such an experimental
testbed supposed to be connected to the Internet without any restriction.
- Authors
- Gregory Detal, Benjamin Hesmans, Olivier Bonaventure, Yves Vanaubel and Benoit Donnet
- Source
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference , October 2013. ACM.
- Full text
-
(317.33 KB) - Cite it
- BibTex
- Copyright
- See here
IEEE Copyright Notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
ACM Copyright Notice: Copyright 1999 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page or intial screen of the document. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept., ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org.
Springer-Verlag LNCS Copyright Notice: The copyright of these contributions has been transferred to Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg New York. The copyright transfer covers the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the contribution, including reprints, translations, photographic reproductions, microform, electronic form (offline, online), or any other reproductions of similar nature. Online available from Springer-Verlag LNCS series.