Resolving IP aliases with prespecified timestamps

Operators and researchers want accurate router-level views of the Internet for purposes including troubleshooting and modeling. However, tools such as traceroute return IP addresses. Because routers may have dozens of IP addresses, or aliases, multiple measurements may return different addresses, obscuring whether they represent the same machine. While many techniques exist to address this issue by identifying some IP aliases, these techniques, even in combination, find only a subset of alias pairs. To improve this state, we design and evaluate a new alias resolution technique using the IP prespecified timestamp option. This option allows a sender to request timestamp values from multiple IP addresses in the same probe. By careful arrangement of these IP addresses, we show that we can infer aliases in many cases. In this paper, we conduct a measurement study of how many routers support IP timestamps, demonstrating that enough honor the option to base our technique on it. Using our tec...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IMC
• Authors: Justine Sherry, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Mary Pimenova, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Thomas E. Anderson, Arvind Krishnamurthy
• Keywords: Aliases, Computer Communication Networks, IMC 2010, Internet Technology, IP Addresses