Googling the internet: profiling internet endpoints via the world wide web

Understanding Internet access trends at a global scale, i.e., how people use the Internet, is a challenging problem that is typically addressed by analyzing network traces. However, obtaining such traces presents its own set of challenges owing to either privacy concerns or to other operational difficulties. The key hypothesis of our work here is that most of the information needed to profile the Internet endpoints is already available around us -- on the web. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for profiling and classifying endpoints. We implement and deploy a Google-based profiling tool, that accurately characterizes endpoint behavior by collecting and strategically combining information freely available on the web. Our Web-based `unconstrained endpoint profiling' (UEP) approach shows advances in the following scenarios: (i) Even when no packet traces are available, it can accurately infer application and protocol usage trends at arbitrary networks; (ii) When network tr...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TON
• Authors: Ionut Trestian, Supranamaya Ranjan, Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, Antonio Nucci
• Keywords: Global Scale, Network Traces, TON 2010, Unconstrained Endpoint