The BGP Hackathon 2016 Report
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The BGP Hackathon 2016 Report Alberto Dainotti Ethan Katz-Bassett Xenofontas Dimitropolous CAIDA, UC San Diego University of Southern California University of Crete / FORTH [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] This article is an editorial note submitted to CCR. It has NOT been peer reviewed. The authors take full responsibility for this article’s technical content. Comments can be posted through CCR Online. ABSTRACT This was the first hackathon centered around BGP, and it in- Internet routes – controlled by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) volved a mix of programming, live experimentation, and collab- – carry our communication and our commerce, yet many aspects of orative research, which made our job as organizers particularly routing are opaque to even network operators, and BGP is known compelling. The hackathon also represented a timely and unique to contribute to performance, reliability, and security problems. opportunity. The Internet would hardly exist without BGP, which The research and operations communities have developed a set of has been the subject of experiments and research for decades. Still, tools and data sources for understanding and experimenting with BGP suffers from issues in performance [35], security [38, 27], and BGP, and on February 2016 we organized the first BGP Hackathon, availability [25], challenging researchers and engineers, who must themed around live measurement and monitoring of Internet rout- deal with the scarcity or incompleteness of empirical data (the AS- ing. The Hackathon included students, researchers, operators, providers, level graph[23], AS relationships[22], deployed routing policies [3] policymakers, and funding agencies, working together on projects etc.). We are in need of improvements to measurement standards, to measure, visualize, and improve routing or the tools we use to capabilities and coverage of data collection platforms, experimen- study routing. This report describes the tools used at the Hackathon tal measurement and emulation testbeds and research tools [18]. and presents an overview of the projects. The Hackathon was a suc- In this context, there have been interesting recent developments: cess, and we look forward to future iterations. (i) providers of public data such as RouteViews and RIPE RIS started working on live data feeds; (ii) Colorado State’s BGPMon has transitioned to community-supported software such as goB- Categories and Subject Descriptors GPd, OpenBMP and Cassandra in order to offer scalable, robust, C.2.3 [Network operations]: Network monitoring; C.2.5 [Local web-based real-time access to BGP data as well as access to over and Wide-Area Networks]: Internet 10 years of archived data; (iii) the PEERING testbed provided re- searchers for the first time with an open community testbed that lets them exchange routes and traffic with hundreds of real networks Keywords around the world; (iv) the first version of BGPStream, CAIDA’s routing, BGP, Internet measurement, hackathon open source framework for BGP data analysis, was released in late 2015 (Section 3). 1. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION The BGP hackathon served two primary roles. First, it facili- tated convergence of these software and infrastructure development On 6-7 February 2016, around 90 researchers and students from efforts and offered a snapshot of the evolving state of the art to a academia, industry and other institutions around the world, par- critical mass of young researchers and seasoned scientists and en- ticipated in the first BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) hackathon. gineers. Second, the hackathon provided a venue to bring together The event, themed on live BGP measurements and monitoring, was people who are interested in Internet routing, but come from dif- hosted by the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) ferent communities and serve different roles – network engineers, at UC San Diego’s San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and developers, data providers, academic and industry researchers, op- was organized in cooperation with Colorado State University (CSU), erators – to meet, discuss, and find opportunities for collaboration University of Southern California (USC), Universidade Federal De and progress. This report describes the involvement of the commu- Minais Gerais (UFMG), Foundation for Research and Technology nity in the event (organizers, sponsors, participants, etc.), the plat- Hellas (FORTH), RouteViews, and RIPE NCC. forms used in the hackathon, with emphasis on novel aspects, the The hackathon was held the weekend immediately preceding the challenges the hacking teams worked on, and the resulting collab- 66th North American Network Operators’ Group (NANOG) con- orations; concluding with lessons learned and ideas on organizing ference [24] and the 8th AIMS academic Internet measurement a similar event in the future. workshop [12], both also held in San Diego, and it aimed to: • bring together these different communities, e.g., to discuss problems operators face that academics may want to research; 2. COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT • advertise (new) tools to the communities, train people to use Planning the hackathon was an interesting community experi- them, and encourage further use; ment itself. The organizing committee, comprising of 7 institutions • bring people together to work on interesting/important prob- [6], met in a CAIDA-hosted workshop on 12-13 November 2015 lems, spurring collaborations; [4]. We defined the format of the event and in particular discussed • provide additional incentive for students to attend NANOG (i) which tools and data sources to make available in the hackathon and for members of the industry to join the hackathon. and how they could complement each other (Section 3) and (ii) a set of challenging projects that participants could pick, transform as exchange traffic with the real Internet. or use for inspiration to propose entirely new projects. Briefly af- Spurred by the needs of the Hackathon, the PEERING team ex- terwards we announced the event. pedited a number of major improvements to the testbed. First, The response from the community was enthusiastic. We received to replace manual, ad-hoc configuration and tracking of PEER- more than 80 applications as competing participant, from which ING sites and experiments, the team built a centralized site that we selected 50 (≈ 30 graduate students) and we assigned 33 travel manages experiments and resources and automatically generates grants (almost entirely to students). Selection criteria for participa- and deploys configuration files to PEERING sites and experiments, tion took into account the ideas for potential projects and feedback making it easier to provision and update experiments. Second, the applicants wrote in the application form, providing equal oppor- team redesigned the toolkit that experimenters use to interact with tunities to students from different countries and institutions, and the testbed, making it easier to use while adding more sophisticated gender balance (we accepted all 6 female applicants – students and functionality, such as control over which peers receive an experi- postdocs). In addition, several experts applied to offer their knowl- ment’s announcements at an IXP. edge to hackathon participants. The 90 attendees, including jury BGPStream is an open-source software framework for live and members, represented academia (50), industry (21, including Face- historical BGP data analysis, supporting scientific research, oper- book, Google, NTT, Cloudflare, DE-CIX, Symantec, Cisco, Com- ational monitoring, and post-event analysis. BGPStream allows cast), US and European government agencies (6, from DHS, NSF, users to either quickly inspect raw BGP data from the command- FNISA), and non-profit organizations (12, including ISOC, LAC- line, develop Python apps, or build complex systems using a C/C++ NIC, M-Lab) [7]. API. BGPStream provides seamless and live access to both the Before the event, the participants interacted through a mailing RouteViews and RIPE RIS data archives, and for the BGP Hackathon list and used the hackathon wiki to comment on and propose project we added experimental live access to a stream of BGP data gen- ideas as well as indicate their specific expertise. During the hackathon, erated by BMP-enabled RouteViews collectors. Organizing the teams of 1 to 7 people formed spontaneously and worked on de- hackathon also pushed us to introduce additional features and fixes veloping code to extend, use and/or integrate existing open source in time for the event, which were released as version 1.1 of the platforms and tools by demonstrating their utility in understand- software framework. ing or solving practical problems, such as detecting BGP prefix The BGPMon system [2] monitors, stores and analyzes BGP hijacking attacks, studying performance of anycast, etc. (Section information captured from approximately 400 routers around the 4). Competing participants worked side by side with top experts world in real-time. The information collected by BGPMon is useful in the field – some of them the developers/maintainers of the plat- to researchers and network operators. BGPmon is open source and forms used in the experiments – who sometimes hacked code and built with community-supported software such as GoBGP, OpenBMP experiments themselves. During both days, the jury members sat and Cassandra. BGPMon can be deployed as a public service, as at the tables with the “hackers” and engaged with them in conver- done at CSU, or as a private service for sensitive