Title:

I-Seismograph: Observing and Measuring Internet Earthquakes

Abstract:

Disruptive events such as large-scale power outages, undersea cable cuts, or Internet worms could cause the Internet to deviate from its normal state of operation.  This deviation from normalcy is what we call the impact on the Internet, which we also refer to as an "Internet earthquake.”  As the Internet is a large, complex moving target, to date there has been little successful research on how to observe and quantify the impact on the Internet, whether it is during specific event periods or in real time.  In this talk, we describe an Internet seismograph, or I-seismograph, to provide a "Richter scale" for the Internet.  Since routing is the most basic function of the Internet and the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the de facto standard inter-domain routing protocol, we focus on BGP.  After defining what "impact" means with respect to BGP, we describe how I-seismograph measures the impact, exemplify its usage with several disruptive events, and further validate its accuracy and consistency.  We show that we can evaluate the impact on BGP during an arbitrary period, including doing so in real time.

Bio:

Dr. Jun Li is an associate professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Oregon, USA, and directs the Network & Security Research Laboratory there. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2002 (with honors), M.E. from Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1995 (with a Presidential Scholarship), and B.S. from Peking University in 1992, all in computer science.  Specializing in computer networks, distributed systems, and their security, Dr. Jun Li is currently researching Internet monitoring and forensics, Internet architecture, social networking, cloud computing, and various network security topics.  He has also served on several US National Science Foundation research panels and on more than 60 international technical program committees.  He is currently an editor of Computer Networks and chair of several workshops and symposiums. Dr. Li is a 2007 recipient of the NSF CAREER award, a senior member of ACM, and a senior member of IEEE.