Content Delivery in the Modern Internet

Опубликовано 6 сентября 2016, 4:58

In recent years, the Internet has experienced an astronomical increase in the use of specialized content delivery systems, such as peer-to-peer file-sharing systems (e.g., Kazaa, Gnutella, or Napster) and content delivery networks (e.g., Akamai). The sudden popularity of peer-to-peer file-sharing systems has resulted in a flurry of research activity into novel peer-to-peer system designs. Because these systems: (1) are fully distributed, without any infrastructure that can be directly measured, (2) have novel distributed designs requiring new crawling techniques, and (3) use proprietary protocols, surprisingly little is known about the performance, behavior, and workload of such systems in practice. This talk remedies this situation. We examine content delivery from the point of view of four content delivery systems: HTTP Web traffic, the Akamai content delivery network, and Kazaa and Gnutella peer-to-peer file sharing networks. Our results (1) quantify the rapidly increasing importance of new content delivery systems, particularly peer-to-peer networks, and (2) characterize peer-to-peer systems both from an infrastructure and workload perspective. Overall, these results provide a new understanding of the behavior of the modern Internet and present a strong basis for the design of newer content delivery systems. At the end of the talk, we present a recent characterization of a new Internet security threat: the spread of spyware. We examine four spyware programs (Gator, Cydoor, SaveNow and eZula) for which we derived signatures that can be used to detect their presence on remote computers through passive network monitoring. Using these signatures, we quantify the spread of spyware within the University of Washington. Our results show that these four programs affect approximately 5.1 of active hosts on campus.