Fingerprinting Internet Paths using Packet Pair Dispersion

Rishi Sinha, Christos Papadopoulos, and John Heidemann
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

Path fingerprinting is an essential component of applications that distinguish among different network paths, including path selection in overlay networks, multi-path routing, monitoring and diagnosis of network problems, and developing a deeper understanding of network behavior. This paper proposes a new approach to Internet path fingerprinting based on the distribution of end-to-end packet-pair measurements. This approach allows detection of busy link sharing between two paths, even when those segments have low utilization and are not the paths' bottlenecks. While our fingerprints do not assure physically disjoint paths (since that requires information external to the network), they reflect the traffic and link characteristics of intermediate links. This methodology is therefore tolerant of opaque clouds such as VPNs, VLANs, or MPLS (unlike traceroute). Using analysis and simulation we explore the network factors that affect the fingerprints, and we introduce a simple method to compare them. Through measurements of up to a year over 15 Internet paths, we show that our fingerprints are both distinct and persistent over periods of several months, making their collection and use for path selection feasible.

Availability

This paper is available in several formats: abstract web page with pointers and cites, PDF, paper copies can be obtained by mail to the authors. Copyright terms for this paper appear below.

Reference

Sinha05a

Rishi Sinha, Christos Papadopoulos, and John Heidemann. Fingerprinting Internet Paths using Packet Pair Dispersion. Technical Report 06-876, University of Southern California Computer Science Department, February, 2005. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Sinha05a.html>.

@techreport{Sinha05a,
	author = "Rishi Sinha and Christos Papadopoulos and John Heidemann",
	title = "Fingerprinting Internet Paths using Packet Pair Dispersion",
	institution = "University of Southern California Computer Science Department",
	year = "2005",
	number = "06-876",
	month = "February",
	keywords = "path fingerprinting, packet pair",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Sinha05a.html",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Sinha05a.pdf",
	copyrightholder = "authors",
	myorganization = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 2005 by its authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that new copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted.

To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission of the authors.