While non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as stay-at-home, shelter-in-place, and school closures are considered the most effective ways to limit the spread of infectious diseases, their use is generally controversial given the political, ethical, and socioeconomic issues they raise. Part of the challenge is the non-obvious link between the level of compliance with such measures and their effectiveness.

IP addresses are commonly used to identify hosts or properties of hosts. The address assigned to a host may change, however, and the extent to which these changes occur in time as well as in the address space is currently unknown, especially in IPv6.

This work presents a large-scale, longitudinal measurement study on the adoption of application updates, enabling continuous reporting of potentially vulnerable software populations worldwide. Studying the factors impacting software currentness, we investigate and discuss the impact of the platform and its updating strategies on software currentness, device lock-in effects, as well as user behavior. Utilizing HTTP User-Agent strings from end-hosts, we introduce techniques to extract application and operating system information from myriad structures, infer version release dates of applications, and measure population adoption, at a global scale. To deal with loosely structured User-Agent data, we develop a semi-supervised method that can reliably extract application and version information for some 87% of requests served by a major CDN every day. Using this methodology, we track release and adoption dynamics of some 35,000 applications. Analyzing over three years of CDN logs, we show that vendors' update strategies and platforms have a significant effect on the adoption of application updates. Our results show that, on some platforms, up to 25% of requests originate from hosts running application versions that are out-of-date by more than 100 days, and 16% more than 300 days. We find pronounced differences across geographical regions, and overall, less developed regions are more likely to have out-of-date software versions. Though, for every country, we find that at least 10% of requests reaching the CDN run software that is out-of-date by more than three months.

Despite its critical role in Internet connectivity, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) remains highly vulnerable to attacks such as prefix hijacking, where an Autonomous System (AS) announces routes for IP space it does not control. To address this issue, the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) was developed starting in 2008, with deployment beginning in 2011. This paper performs the first comprehensive, longitudinal study of the deployment, coverage, and quality of RPKI. We use a unique dataset containing all RPKI Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs) from the moment RPKI was first deployed, more than 8 years ago. We combine this dataset with BGP announcements from more than 3,300 BGP collectors worldwide. Our analysis shows the after a gradual start, RPKI has seen a rapid increase in adoption over the past two years. We also show that although misconfigurations were rampant when RPKI was first deployed (causing many announcements to appear as invalid) they are quite rare today. We develop a taxonomy of invalid RPKI announcements, then quantify their prevalence. We further identify suspicious announcements indicative of prefix hijacking and present case studies of likely hijacks. Overall, we conclude that while misconfigurations still do occur, RPKI is "ready for the big screen," and routing security can be increased by dropping invalid announcements. To foster reproducibility and further studies, we release all RPKI data and the tools we used to analyze it into the public domain.

In-Flight Communication (IFC), available on a growing number of commercial flights, is often received by consumers with both awe for its mere availability and harsh criticism for its poor performance. Indeed, IFC provides Internet connectivity in some of the most challenging conditions with aircraft traveling at speeds in excess of 500 mph at 30,000 feet above the ground. Yet, while existing services do provide basic Internet \em accessibility, anecdotal reports rank their quality of service as, at best, poor. In this paper, we present the first characterization of deployed IFC systems. Using over 45 flight-hours of measurements, we profile the performance of IFC across the two dominant access technologies -- direct air-to-ground communication (DA2GC) and mobile satellite service (MSS). We show that IFC QoS is in large part determined by the high latencies inherent to DA2GC and MSS, with RTTs averaging 200ms and 750ms, respectively, and that these high latencies directly impact the performance of common applications such as web browsing. While each IFC technology is based on well studied wireless communication technologies, our findings reveal that IFC links experience further degraded link performance than their technological antecedents. We find median loss rates of 7%, and nearly 40% loss at the 90th percentile for MSS, 6.8x larger than recent characterizations of residential satellite networks. We extend our IFC study exploring the potential of the newly released HTTP/2 and QUIC protocols in an emulated IFC environment, finding that QUIC is able to improve page load times by as much as 7.9 times. In addition, we find that HTTP/2»s use of multiplexing multiple requests onto a single TCP connection performs up to 4.8x \em worse than HTTP/1.1 when faced with large numbers of objects. We use network emulation to explore proposed technological improvements to existing IFC systems finding that high link losses, and not bandwidth, account for the largest factor of performance degradation with applications such as web browsing.

The impressive growth of the mobile Internet has motivated several industry reports retelling the story in terms of number of devices or subscriptions sold per regions, or the increase in mobile traffic, both WiFi and cellular. Yet, despite the abundance of such reports, we still lack an understanding of the impact of cellular networks around the world.

The goal of our work is to characterize the current state of Cuba's access to the wider Internet. This work is motivated by recent improvements in connectivity to the island and the growing commercial interest following the ease of restrictions on travel and trade with the US. In this paper, we profile Cuba's networks, their connections to the rest of the world, and the routes of international traffic going to and from the island. Despite the addition of the ALBA-1 submarine cable, we find that round trip times to websites hosted off the island remain very high; pings to popular websites frequently took over 300 ms. We also find a high degree of path asymmetry in traffic to/from Cuba. Specifically, in our analysis we find that traffic going out of Cuba typically travels through the ALBA-1 cable, but, surprisingly, traffic on the reverse path often traverses high-latency satellite links, adding over 200 ms to round trip times. Last, we analyze queries to public DNS servers and SSL certificate requests to characterize the availability of network services in Cuba.

Crowdsensing leverages the pervasiveness and power of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to enable ordinary citizens to collect, transport and verify data. Application domains range from environment monitoring, to infrastructure management and social computing. Crowdsensing services' effectiveness is a direct result of their coverage, which is driven by the recruitment and mobility patterns of participants. Due to the typically uneven population distributions of most areas, and the regular mobility patterns of participants, less popular or populated areas suffer from poor coverage. In this paper, we present Crowd Soft Control (CSC), an approach to exert limited control over the actions of participants by leveraging the built-in incentives of location-based gaming and social applications. By pairing crowdsensing with location-based applications, CSC allows sensing services to reuse the incentives of location-based apps to steer the actions of participating users and increase the effectiveness of sensing campaigns. While there are several domains where this intentional movement is useful such as data muling, this paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of CSC applied to crowdsensing. We built a prototype of CSC and integrated it with two location-based applications, and crowdsensing services. Our experimental results demonstrate the low-cost of integration and minimal overhead of CSC.

DNS plays a critical role in the performance of smartdevices within cellular networks. Besides name resolution, DNS is commonly relied upon for directing users to nearby content caches for better performance. In light of this, it is surprising how little is known about the structure of cellular DNS and its effectiveness as a client localization method.

No abstract available.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) rely on the Domain Name System (DNS) for replica server selection. DNS-based server selection builds on the assumption that, in the absence of information about the client's actual network location, the location of a client's DNS resolver provides a good approximation. The recent growth of remote DNS services breaks this assumption and can negatively impact client's web performance.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a fundamental component of today's Internet. Recent years have seen radical changes to DNS with increases in usage of remote DNS and public DNS services such as OpenDNS. Given the close relationship between DNS and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and the pervasive use of CDNs by many popular applications including web browsing and real-time entertainment services, it is important to understand the impact of remote and public DNS services on users' overall experience on the Web. This work presents a tool, namehelp, which comparatively evaluates DNS services in terms of the web performance they provide, and implements an end-host solution to address the performance impact of remote DNS on CDNs. The demonstration will show the functionality of namehelp with online results for its performance improvements.