Towards a Renewed Alias Resolution with Space Search Reduction and IP Fingerprinting

Since the early 2000's, the Internet Topology has been frequently described and modeled from the perspective of routers. To this end, alias resolution mechanisms have been developed in order to aggregate all IP interfaces of a router, collected with traceroute, into a single identifier. So far, many active measurement techniques have been considered, often taking advantage of specific features from network protocols. However, a lot of these methods have seen their efficiency decrease over time due to security reinforcements across the Internet.

In this paper, we introduce a generic methodology to conduct efficient and scalable alias resolution. It combines the space search reduction of TreeNET (a tool for efficiently discovering subnets) with a fingerprinting process used to assess the feasibility of several state-of-the-art alias resolution methods, using a small, fixed amount of probes. We validate our method along MIDAR on an academic groundtruth and demonstrate that our methodology can achieve similar accuracy while using less probes and discovering subnets in the process. We further evaluate our method with measurements made on PlanetLab towards several distinct ASes of varying sizes and roles in the Internet. The collected data shows that some properties of our fingerprints correlate with each other, hinting some observed profiles could be linked with equipment vendors. Both TreeNET (which implements our methodology) and our dataset are freely available.