In blockchain systems, event notification is a valuable feature that eliminates the need for clients to actively monitor each event recorded by the blockchain. However, providing proof of notification-a verifiable guarantee that a notification was sent-is challenging to scale in high-throughput environments. This paper presents Signet, a novel system that enables the network itself to provide scalable and verifiable proof of notification. Leveraging path-aware networks, Signet utilizes Autonomous Systems (ASes) along the agreed-upon traffic path as impartial witnesses. These ASes, relied upon by both the notifier and recipient, provide lightweight proofs of packet observation to be submitted to the blockchain. This approach minimizes computational overhead and storage costs while maintaining security and scalability. Our evaluation demonstrates that the routers can handle over a million notifications per second per core, with under a microsecond of per-packet overhead, and that the smart contract operations on the blockchain incur negligible costs.

Although our lives are increasingly transitioning into the digital world, many digital assets still relate to objects or places in the physical world, e.g., websites of stores or restaurants, digital documents claiming property ownership, or digital identifiers encoded in QR codes for mobile payments in shops. Currently, users cannot securely associate digital assets with their related physical space, leading to problems such as fake brand stores, property fraud, and mobile payment scams. In many cases, the necessary information to protect digital assets exists, e.g., via contractual relationships and cadaster entries, but there is currently no uniform way of retrieving and verifying these documents. In this work, we propose the Geo-Enabled Cryptographic Key Oracle (GECKO), a geographical PKI that provides a global view of digital assets based on their geolocation and occupied space. GECKO allows for the bidirectional translation of trust between the physical and digital world. Users can verify which assets are supposed to exist at their location, as well as verify which physical space is claimed by a digital entity. GECKO supplements current PKI systems and can be used in addition to current systems when its properties are of value.

System operators can increasingly exploit distributed energy resources (DERs) and controllable loads (CLs) to provide frequency response services. In conventional practice, communication between the system operator and flexible devices relies on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)-based Internet. However, existing BGP-based architectures face challenges in providing latency-guaranteed control, while direct private and proprietary communication networks lead to additional deployment and maintenance costs. In contrast, the SCION-based Internet architecture supports latency-minimum path selection, which makes it suitable for latency-sensitive frequency contingency services such as fast frequency response (FFR). Hence, this paper proposes a real-time reserve dispatch framework to optimally select a portfolio of flexible devices to deliver FFR services using the SCION-based Internet. First, an analytical expression of the system frequency dynamics with respect to heterogeneous communication latencies is derived. Next, a cyber-physical co-optimization model is formulated to jointly schedule communication paths and physical flexibility resources for real-time FFR provision. To improve the computation efficiency, we propose a heuristic FFR allocation algorithm to approximate the optimal response portfolio, integrating contributions from both DERs and CLs. Numerical case studies demonstrate the benefits of the proposed algorithm and its capability to approximate the optimality of the reserves allocation while significantly reducing the computation time.

To understand the fairness properties of the BBR congestion-control algorithm (CCA), previous research has analyzed BBR behavior with a variety of models. However, previous model-based work suffers from a trade-off between accuracy and interpretability: While dynamic fluid models generate highly accurate predictions through simulation, the causes of their predictions cannot be easily understood. In contrast, steady-state models predict CCA behavior in a manner that is intuitively understandable, but often less accurate. This trade-off is especially consequential when analyzing the competition between BBR and traditional loss-based CCAs, as this competition often suffers from instability, i.e., sending-rate oscillation. Steady-state models cannot predict this instability at all, and fluid-model simulation cannot yield analytical results regarding preconditions and severity of the oscillation. To overcome this trade-off, we extend the recent dynamic fluid model of BBR by means of control theory. Based on this control-theoretic analysis, we derive quantitative conditions for BBR/CUBIC oscillation, identify network settings that are susceptible to instability, and find that these conditions are frequently satisfied by practical networks. Our analysis illuminates the fairness implications of BBR/CUBIC oscillation, namely by deriving and experimentally validating fairness bounds that reflect the extreme rate distributions during oscillation. In summary, our analysis shows that BBR/CUBIC oscillation is frequent and harms BBR fairness, but can be remedied by means of our control-theoretic framework.

Although our lives are increasingly transitioning into the digital world, many digital assets still relate to objects or places in the physical world, e.g., websites of stores or restaurants, digital documents claiming property ownership, or digital identifiers encoded in QR codes for mobile payments in shops. Currently, users cannot securely associate digital assets with their related physical space, leading to problems such as fake brand stores, property fraud, and mobile payment scams. In many cases, the necessary information to protect digital assets exists, e.g., via contractual relationships and cadaster entries, but there is currently no uniform way of retrieving and verifying these documents. In this work, we propose the Geo-Enabled Cryptographic Key Oracle (GECKO), a geographical PKI that provides a global view of digital assets based on their geo-location and occupied space. GECKO allows for the bidirectional translation of trust between the physical and digital world. Users can verify which assets are supposed to exist at their location, as well as verify which physical space is claimed by a digital entity. GECKO supplements current PKI systems and can be used in addition to current systems when its properties are of value. We show the feasibility of efficiently storing millions of assets and serving cryptographic material based on precise location queries within 11 ms at a rate of more than 19000 queries per second on a single server.

Reducing our society's energy demand is critical to address the sustainability challenge. While the Internet currently accounts for 1-1.5% of global electricity consumption and continues to grow, the energy demands of one of its core components-routers-remain poorly understood. The available power data is limited and not fine-grained enough, offering little actionable insight into strategies for effectively reducing the Internet's energy consumption. To address this, we assemble and present a unique dataset including datasheet information, router-internal measurements, external power measurements, and router power models. This dataset depicts a clearer picture of routers' energy demand and provides insights on how to reduce it. Our initial analysis of the dataset suggests, e.g., that (i) datasheets are not useful predictors, sometimes even incorrect; (ii) internal router power measurements have limited accuracy; (iii) using more efficient and better-sized power supply units is a promising energy-saving vector; (iv) turning links off is less efficient than anticipated in the literature. This work also highlights the limitations of today's power monitoring practices and provides suggestions for improvement.

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), while essential for Internet connectivity, faces many stability and convergence challenges in today's evolving routing ecosystem. In this paper, we present the discovery of the BGP Vortex, a configuration where just three legitimate BGP UPDATE messages can trigger persistent instability. We demonstrate that this vulnerability can be weaponized as an attack vector, potentially causing widespread Internet connectivity issues through router overload and forwarding loops. Crucially, a BGP Vortex cannot be prevented by existing security mechanisms such as BGPSEC or RPKI, because the protocol messages involved are legitimate. All major router implementations we could experiment with are susceptible to this threat. At its root, the BGP Vortex is caused by standards-compliant BGP extensions—BGP Communities in this case— that allow the modification of route preferences for traffic engineering purposes. Therefore, to aid the mitigation of this attack as well as its potential future variations, we propose a framework to determine which BGP extensions are problematic, and which are safe to deploy. Our findings highlight the need to carefully balance network operators' traffic engineering capabilities with routing stability requirements.

We present the first formally-verified Internet router, which is part of the SCION Internet architecture. SCION routers run a cryptographic protocol for secure packet forwarding in an adversarial environment. We verify both the protocol's network-wide security properties and the low-level properties of its implementation. Namely, we develop a series of protocol models by refinement in Isabelle/HOL and we use an automated program verifier to prove that the router's Go code satisfies crash freedom, freedom from data races, and adheres to the most concrete model in our series of refinements. Both verification efforts are soundly linked together. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of coherently verifying a security-critical network component from high-level protocol models down to performance-optimized production code, developed by an independent team. In the process, we uncovered critical attacks and bugs in both the protocol and its implementation, which were confirmed by the code developers, and we strengthened the protocol's security properties. This paper presents the challenges we faced when verifying an existing real-world system, explains our approach to tackling these challenges, summarizes the main results, and distills valuable lessons for the verification of secure systems, in particular for the techniques and tools employed.

Measuring the frequency of items in data streams is a relevant and wide-spread problem in stream analysis and Internet traffic monitoring. This paper studies the problem of sketch-based frequency estimation from a Bayesian statistics point of view which captures uncertainties regarding the frequencies of items in a more flexible and quantitative way compared to the state of the art. We design and implement, based on Markov chain Monte Carlo, a Bayesian frequency estimation sketch that provides both state of the art accuracy, as well as greater functionality compared to other sketches such as confidence bounds for arbitrary levels, and error-function aware frequency estimates. In our theoretical work we derive information-theory related equations such as the expected information gain of a sketch, as well as the optimal least-squares Bayesian frequency estimator. In benchmarks comparing the state of the art, the proposed method achieves the lowest absolute error across all real world data streams, as well as outperforming all sketches on 4 out of 5 metrics on synthetic data. We also show that our method can provide, for multiple confidence levels simultaneously, good confidence levels on both synthetic as well as real data.

Path-Aware Networking enables applications to select network paths based on performance objectives. We present a prototype video-streaming system that integrates Scalable Video Coding with SCION's multi-path routing. Our study highlights both the potential and overhead of a practical multi-path application, offering insights for future multi-path use cases.

To realize the long-standing vision of providing quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees on a public Internet, this paper introduces Hummingbird: a lightweight QoS-system that provides fine-grained inter-domain reservations for end hosts. Hummingbird enables flexible and composable reservations with end-to-end guarantees, and addresses an often overlooked, but crucial, aspect of bandwidth-reservation systems: incentivization of network providers. Hummingbird represents bandwidth reservations as tradable assets, allowing markets to emerge. These markets then ensure fair and efficient resource allocation and encourage deployment by remunerating providers. This incentivization is facilitated by decoupling reservations from network identities, which enables novel control-plane mechanisms and allows the design of a control plane based on smart contracts. Hummingbird also provides an efficient reservation data plane, which streamlines the processing on routers and thus simplifies the implementation, deployment, and traffic policing, while maintaining robust security properties. Our prototype implementation demonstrates the efficiency and scalability of Hummingbird's asset-based control plane, and our high-speed software implementation can fill a 160 Gbps link with Hummingbird packets on commodity hardware.

Path-aware networking (PAN) enables endpoints to locally select end-to-end network paths based on path properties. This approach contrasts with the traditional Internet architecture, where routers determine the next hop towards the destination based on the routing information provided by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). By providing this additional transparency and control, PAN opens up opportunities to optimize path selection, with the potential to enhance network performance and user experience metrics. In this paper, we evaluate the potential benefits of PAN for enhancing end-to-end performance. We design Polaris, a concrete feedback-driven path optimization mechanism for PAN, and study its impact on Quality of Service (QoS) as compared to current Internet mechanisms. Our extensive simulation results show the viability and effectiveness of Polaris, revealing that it outperforms the current Internet mechanisms by an average of 42% improvement in receiving rate and 81% reduction in median loss, in the presence of background traffic.

In just a few decades, the Internet has evolved from a research prototype to a cyber-physical infrastructure of critical importance for modern society and the global economy. Surprisingly, despite its new role, the survivability of the Internet-its ability to fulfill its mission in the presence of large-scale failures-has received limited attention. We introduce Domino, our initial design and implementation of a testbench tool for stress testing the Internet's routing system, a key element of the critical Internet infrastructure. The simulation-based testbench consists of a comprehensive and flexible framework that allows for the incorporation of diverse survivability metrics, provides a platform for specifying, evaluating, and comparing different topologies of the underlying Internet infrastructure, and can account for modifications to networking protocols and architectural components. By demonstrating the utility of the proposed testbench with a number of illustrative examples, we make a case for stress testing as a viable approach to evaluating the Internet's survivability in the face of evolving challenges.

The SCION Next-Generation Network (NGN) architecture has expanded steadily since 2017, with today 20+ ISPs offering SCION connectivity. In production, IP-to-SCION-to-IP translation by SCION-IP-Gateways (SIGs) is used, such that applications are unaware of the NGN communication. To accelerate innovation and deployments, our aim is to increase the number of native SCION use cases, where the application is fully SCION-aware and optimizes communication across all path choices offered by the network. We set out to achieve two core objectives: (1) facilitating simple native connectivity for applications, and (2) enhancing the scalability of SCION deployment at academic sites. With these goals in mind, we built the SCION Education, Research, and Academic (SCIERA) network infrastructure. This paper presents key lessons learned from the SCIERA deployment, which we anticipate will offer actionable insights to researchers, network operators, and system builders seeking to overcome practical challenges also for other NGN deployments. We report on establishing native SCION connectivity at research and education institutions that can reach 250,000 people across five continents, without relying on BGP. Our evaluation demonstrates that our core objectives were reached. Today, the SCIERA deployment offers tangible real-world benefits to users by providing rich global connectivity through a multitude of inter-domain paths.

Numerous vital applications depend on accurately synchronized time, and disruptions can yield severe consequences in terms of safety and security. Yet, establishing cost-efficient and robust synchronization across geographically distributed devices is challenging. Many solutions for global time synchronization require placing trust in a single entity or system, for example in Global Navigation Satellite Systems (G NSSes) or leased infrastructure providers, constituting a single point of failure and often incurring high costs. An alternative, cost-effective solution is to run time synchronization over the Internet. However, this approach faces challenges in achieving (i) precise time synchronization, (ii) robustness to failing, misconfigured, or compromised nodes, and (iii) robustness to congestion-related issues such as volumetric DDoS attacks. Existing proposals mostly attempt to solve challenges (i) and (ii), but none provide robustness against congestion and volumetric DDoS. We address the challenges identified in previous work with Everdeen. Everdeen minimizes costs by running on existing Internet infrastructure and avoids relying on any single en-tity by enabling nodes to mutually synchronize time. The core innovation of Everdeen is its weighted neighbor-based (WNB) synchronization mode, where participants synchronize exclusively with their direct neighbors. Our evaluation shows that Everdeen provides better time synchronization quality at lower communication overhead compared to prior work. It is also considerably more robust against failing, misconfigured, or compromised hosts. Most importantly, we experimentally demonstrate that time synchronization traffic protected with Everdeen is unaffected by network congestion, including vol-umetric DDoS attacks.

With the rapid evolution and diversification of Internet applications, their communication-quality criteria are continuously evolving. To globally optimize communication quality, the Internet's control plane thus needs to optimize inter-domain paths on diverse criteria, and should provide flexibility for adding new criteria or modifying existing ones. However, existing inter-domain routing protocols and proposals satisfy these requirements at best to a limited degree. We propose IREC, an inter-domain routing architecture that enables multi-criteria path optimization with extensible criteria through parallel execution and real-time addition of independent routing algorithms, together with the possibility for end domains to express their desired criteria to the control plane. We show IREC's viability by implementing it on a global testbed, and use simulations on a realistic Internet topology to demonstrate IREC's potential for path optimization in real-world deployments.

Access control systems typically evaluate the security aspects of communication endpoints to determine access permission, but they often overlook network-level threats. We argue that access control decisions for remote entities should be made with explicit consideration of the transit network environment. In this study, we propose a novel concept called PAAC, path-aware attribute-based access control, which extends existing endpoint-oriented access decisions by considering transit network information. By incorporating network metrics, the access control system enables finer-grained access control and mitigates network-level threats such as BGP hijacking. Our experiments demonstrate that PAAC achieves comparable performance and scalability to existing attribute-based access control approaches.

We instigate the study of adversarial congestion in the context of the Domain Name System (DNS). By strategically choking inter-server channels, this new type of DoS attack can disrupt a large user group's access to target DNS servers at a low cost. In reminiscence of classic network congestion control, we propose a DNS congestion control (DCC) framework as a fundamental yet practical mitigation measure for such attacks. With an optimized fair-queuing message scheduler, DCC ensures benign clients fair access to inter-server channels regardless of an attacker's behavior; with a set of extensible anomaly detection and signaling mechanisms, it minimizes collateral damage to innocuous clients. We architect DCC in a non-invasive style so that it can readily augment existing DNS servers. Our prototype evaluation demonstrates that DCC effectively mitigates adversarial congestion while incurring minor performance overheads.