GlobalizingWeb Based Visual Traceroute

By Srikanth K S, Sai Preethy

• Web based visual traceroute - Aimed at visualizing traceroute command on international scale.

• RIPE Atlas RESTful API, RIPE Stat API will be used for running traceroute requests. Utilizing worldwide employed RIPE Atlas probes.

• Implemented parts – Used RIPE Atlas to issue the tracroute request and RIPEStat API to fetch the location, latitude, longitude of the IP Addresses.

Recap

• Challenges faced – Making our application real time.

• Midterm status - Our application gets source and target details from the user and displays the intermediate locations which include the country, city, latitude and longitude of those locations. Since the application takes some time to execute the traceroute request we have attached the screenshots of the results.

Recap

• We have overcome the challenge of making it real time. Now our application caches the traceroutes requests and allows users to choose between Fresh and Stored traceroutes for a request that has been made before. The screenshot of the front page is shown below:

Progress

• Our application is now capable of displaying the traceroute on google maps. If a fresh traceroute from Australia to “stonybrook.edu” is selected, it will be displayed as shown below. The IPs traversed from source to destination will be displayed at respective locations.

Progress

• What happens when we issue a traceroute from China to Facebook considering it’s blocked? As shown in the screenshot below, the traceroute stopped at an IP “201.112.61.214”. Hence we have an indicator on the page “Target Reached?” which says “Yes!” when target is reached and “No!” when it doesn’t.

Progress

• Our application presents a list of already issued traceroutes as shown below. Now user will have an option to directly select and run an old traceroute. Below we have selected Turkey to Stonybrook.edu

Progress

• As shown below, a cached traceroute between Trukey and Stonybrook.edu is provided by the application:

Progress

• Challenge faced: Measurement issued with country code failed. Ex: Turkey to stonybrook.edu

• “Given the nature of the internet, it's always impossible to be 100% certain of where a probe actually resides.  It's possible that the probe is in fact in Turkey and simply routing all of it's traffic through a US proxy (knowingly or otherwise).  Regardless we will be contacting this probe host to enquire as to their specific situation. For future reference though, it's important to note that RIPE Atlas is just like any other part of the Internet: you must work with it in a fault-tolerant fashion. There are currently 14 probes in Turkey, fetching a single measurement result from just one of them will never give you enough data to reach a reliable conclusion. Instead, I suggest that you make use of all 14, see which ones are able to respond (4 of them are currently offline) and then measure what you need a few times, taking a median value”

• Solution: We have decided to acquire a list of probes for every country and send the probe Id which is currently connected instead of the country code.

Progress

• On the application level, implementing features such as displaying timestamps for the cached requests might help user to evaluate his choice between fresh and stored requests.

• Now that a visual representation of “traceroute” has been developed, we hope implementing the same for many other internet measurements such as DNS, Ping etc., might prove useful.

Future

THANK YOU

Questions?