CCRI: Grand: Integrated Laboratory for Advanced Network Data Science (ILANDS)

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

There is a dearth of suitable data to support Internet infrastructure research, for understandable reasons: complexity, scale, and cost of measurement, processing, and storage instrumentation; privacy, security and commercial sensitivities; and lack of incentives to gather data in the first place. This lack of data hinders researchers' ability to understand and reason about real-world properties of the Internet such as robustness, resilience, security, and stability. In this project, University of California-San Diego's Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) and University of Oregon's Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) propose to upgrade and integrate two key Internet measurement capabilities -- 100GB traffic capture and BGP routing data collection -- to enable a community of researchers to collaborate on a focused agenda: understanding the evolving character of the Internet, with the objective of assessing, modeling and shaping its security and resilience. The goal of this project is to create a transformative cyberinfrastructure for the aforementioned two key Internet measurement capabilities that supports collection, curation (including anonymization), archiving, and expanded sharing of data needed to answer critical questions about the Internet as evolving critical infrastructure. This project will enhance infrastructure to sustain increased packet rates and routing table growth, expand storage and compute resources to support long-term use of the data, and develop additional tools to facilitate their combined use. While these two data sources have existed separately in the past, current privacy-protection approaches have prohibited joint analysis across them. Another goal of this effort is to evaluate and deploy approaches to protect privacy that will permit integration of the gathered data, a new capability that is critical to some of the identified research goals. The proposed enhancements to support data acquisition, curation, and privacy-respecting sharing will have an inherent equalizing effect on the community, lowering the barriers to undertaking and validating empirical Internet-related research. The data and outreach activities will enable advances to a broad range of disciplines that now depend on data about the Internet, including network science, socioeconomic studies, international relations, and political science. The project repository will be linked from the proposal and milestones page at: https://caida.org/funding/ccri-ilands at least through the duration of the project. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.