Scriptroute: a public internet measurement facility

Scriptroute, a system that allows ordinary Internet users to conduct network measurements from remote vantage points, is presented and it is found that the system is flexible enough to implement a variety of measurement tools despite its security restrictions, and that scripting is an apt choice for expressing and combining measurement tasks.

Abstract

We present Scriptroute, a system that allows ordinary Internet users to conduct network measurements from remote vantage points. We seek to combine the flex-ibility found in dedicated measurement testbeds such as NIMI with the general accessibility and popularityof Web-based public traceroute servers. To use Scriptroute, clients use DNS to discover measurement serversand then submit a measurement script for execution in a sandboxed, resource-limited environment. The serversensure that the script does not expose the network to attack by applying source- and destination-specific filtersand security checks, and by rate-limiting traffic. Scriptroute code is publicly available and has been de-ployed on the PlanetLab testbed of 42 sites. As proof-of-concept, we have used it both to create RPT, a toolfor measuring routing trees toward a destination, and to repeat the experiment used to evaluate GNP, a recently proposed Internet distance estimation technique. We find that our system is flexible enough to implement avariety of measurement tools despite its security restrictions, that access to many remote vantage points makesthe system valuable, and that scripting is an apt choice for expressing and combining measurement tasks.