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Borders and gateways: measuring and analyzing national as chokepoints

Published: 03 July 2019 Publication History
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    Internet topology reflects economic and political constraints that change over time. Although autonomous systems (AS) topology has been measured and modeled for many years, focusing primarily on economic relationships, earlier studies have not quantified how topology is changing with respect to nation-state boundaries. National boundaries are natural points of control for surveillance, censorship, tariffs and data localization. This paper introduces a measure, national choke-point potential (NCP), to characterize how a country's AS topology is organized in terms of BGP paths that can carry traffic across international borders. To study country-level chokepoints, we developed BGP-SAS, an open source, cross platform, efficient set of tools for simulating BGP routing and calculating national chokepoint measures. We use these tools to assess how AS topologies have changed over a ten-year span, finding significant variability among countries, with some increasing their chokepoint potential and others remaining constant, fluctuating, and in some cases declining. Overall, however, most national Internet boundaries have either become more pronounced or remained constant, despite new infrastructure buildouts and increased Internet usage. When compared to independent measures of Internet freedom, we find statistically significant relationships between NCP and Internet freedom.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    COMPASS '19: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies
    July 2019
    290 pages
    ISBN:9781450367141
    DOI:10.1145/3314344
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or 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. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 03 July 2019

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    • (2022)iGDBProceedings of the 22nd ACM Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3517745.3561443(433-448)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2022
    • (2022)Cutting Through the Noise to Infer Autonomous System TopologyIEEE INFOCOM 2022 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM48880.2022.9796874(1609-1618)Online publication date: 2-May-2022
    • (2022)Quantifying Nations’ Exposure to Traffic Observation and Selective TamperingPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-030-98785-5_29(645-674)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2022
    • (2021)DNSWeight: Quantifying Country-Wise Importance of Domain Name SystemIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2021.31129269(133240-133257)Online publication date: 2021
    • (2021)A Review of Internet Topology Research at the Autonomous System LevelProceedings of Sixth International Congress on Information and Communication Technology10.1007/978-981-16-2377-6_54(581-598)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2021

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