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Marcin Nawrocki

Publications and source records attributed to Marcin Nawrocki.

14 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2025

Scanning the IPv6 Internet Using Subnet-Router Anycast Probing

Identifying active IPv6 addresses is challenging. Various methods emerged to master the measurement challenge in this huge address space, including hitlists, new probing techniques, and AI-generated target lists. In this paper, we apply active Subnet-Router anycast (SRA) probing, a commonly unused method to explore the IPv6 address space. We compare our results with lists of active IPv6 nodes obtained from prior methods and with random probing. Our findings indicate that probing an SRA address reveals on average 10% more router IP addresses than random probing and is far less affected by ICMP rate limiting. Compared to targeting router addresses directly, SRA probing discovers 80% more addresses. We conclude that SRA probing is an important addition to the IPv6 measurement toolbox and may improve the stability of results significantly. We also find evidence that some active scans can cause harmful conditions in current IPv6 deployments, which we started to fix in collaboration with network operators.

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arXiv2025

Waiting for QUIC: Passive Measurements to Understand QUIC Deployments

QUIC experiences a rapid adoption since its standardization in 2021, and hypergiants configure their infrastructure to optimize for QUIC performance. In this paper, we introduce a passive measurement method to study both the progressive rollout and individual hypergiant configurations during the last five years. By analyzing backscatter traffic of the UCSD network telescope, we are able to make the following observations. First, Meta, Google, and Cloudflare configure significantly different maximal retransmission numbers and timeouts. Second, we can identify different off-net deployments of hypergiants, using packet features, such as QUIC connection IDs, packet coalescence, and packet lengths. Third, we observe changing hypergiant deployment configurations during our different measurement periods. Fourth, connection IDs can allow further insights into load balancer deployments, such as the number of servers. We bolster our results using two orthogonal measurements: passive recording of QUIC flows and active probing.

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arXiv2024

ReACKed QUICer: Measuring the Performance of Instant Acknowledgments in QUIC Handshakes

In this paper, we present a detailed performance analysis of QUIC instant ACK, a standard-compliant approach to reduce waiting times during the QUIC connection setup in common CDN deployments. To understand the root causes of the performance properties, we combine numerical analysis and the emulation of eight QUIC implementations using the QUIC Interop Runner. Our experiments comprehensively cover packet loss and non-loss scenarios, different round trip times, and TLS certificate sizes. To clarify instant ACK deployments in the wild, we conduct active measurements of 1M popular domain names. For almost all domain names under control of Cloudflare, Cloudflare uses instant ACK, which in fact improves performance. We also find, however, that instant ACK may lead to unnecessary retransmissions or longer waiting times under some network conditions, raising awareness of drawbacks of instant ACK in the future.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2024

The Age of DDoScovery: An Empirical Comparison of Industry and Academic DDoS Assessments

Motivated by the impressive but diffuse scope of DDoS research and reporting, we undertake a multistakeholder (joint industry-academic) analysis to seek convergence across the best available macroscopic views of the relative trends in two dominant classes of attacks - direct-path attacks and reflection-amplification attacks. We first analyze 24 industry reports to extract trends and (in)consistencies across observations by commercial stakeholders in 2022. We then analyze ten data sets spanning industry and academic sources, across four years (2019-2023), to find and explain discrepancies based on data sources, vantage points, methods, and parameters. Our method includes a new approach: we share an aggregated list of DDoS targets with industry players who return the results of joining this list with their proprietary data sources to reveal gaps in visibility of the academic data sources. We use academic data sources to explore an industry-reported relative drop in spoofed reflection-amplification attacks in 2021-2022. Our study illustrates the value, but also the challenge, in independent validation of security-related properties of Internet infrastructure. Finally, we reflect on opportunities to facilitate greater common understanding of the DDoS landscape. We hope our results inform not only future academic and industry pursuits but also emerging policy efforts to reduce systemic Internet security vulnerabilities.

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arXiv2023

Securing name resolution in the IoT: DNS over CoAP

In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and analysis of DNS over CoAP (DoC), a new proposal for secure and privacy-friendly name resolution of constrained IoT devices. We implement different design choices of DoC in RIOT, an open-source operating system for the IoT, evaluate performance measures in a testbed, compare with DNS over UDP and DNS over DTLS, and validate our protocol design based on empirical DNS IoT data. Our findings indicate that plain DoC is on par with common DNS solutions for the constrained IoT but significantly outperforms when additional standard features of CoAP are used such as caching. With OSCORE, we can save more than 10 kBytes of code memory compared to DTLS, when a CoAP application is already present, and retain the end-to-end trust chain with intermediate proxies, while leveraging features such as group communication or encrypted en-route caching. We also discuss a compression scheme for very restricted links that reduces data by up to 70%.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2023

SoK: A Data-driven View on Methods to Detect Reflective Amplification DDoS Attacks Using Honeypots

In this paper, we revisit the use of honeypots for detecting reflective amplification attacks. These measurement tools require careful design of both data collection and data analysis including cautious threshold inference. We survey common amplification honeypot platforms as well as the underlying methods to infer attack detection thresholds and to extract knowledge from the data. By systematically exploring the threshold space, we find most honeypot platforms produce comparable results despite their different configurations. Moreover, by applying data from a large-scale honeypot deployment, network telescopes, and a real-world baseline obtained from a leading DDoS mitigation provider, we question the fundamental assumption of honeypot research that convergence of observations can imply their completeness. Conclusively we derive guidance on precise, reproducible honeypot research, and present open challenges.

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arXiv2022

On the Interplay between TLS Certificates and QUIC Performance

In this paper, we revisit the performance of the QUIC connection setup and relate the design choices for fast and secure connections to common Web deployments. We analyze over 1M Web domains with 272k QUIC-enabled services and find two worrying results. First, current practices of creating, providing, and fetching Web certificates undermine reduced round trip times during the connection setup since sizes of 35% of server certificates exceed the amplification limit. Second, non-standard server implementations lead to larger amplification factors than QUIC permits, which increase even further in IP spoofing scenarios. We present guidance for all involved stakeholders to improve the situation.

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arXiv2022

The Race to the Vulnerable: Measuring the Log4j Shell Incident

The critical remote-code-execution (RCE) Log4Shell is a severe vulnerability that was disclosed to the public on December 10, 2021. It exploits a bug in the wide-spread Log4j library. Any service that uses the library and exposes an interface to the Internet is potentially vulnerable. In this paper, we measure the rush of scanners during the two months after the disclosure. We use several vantage points to observe both researchers and attackers. For this purpose, we collect and analyze payloads sent by benign and malicious communication parties, their origins, and churn. We find that the initial rush of scanners quickly ebbed. Especially non-malicious scanners were only interested in the days after the disclosure. In contrast, malicious scanners continue targeting the vulnerability.

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arXiv2021

Transparent Forwarders: An Unnoticed Component of the Open DNS Infrastructure

In this paper, we revisit the open DNS (ODNS) infrastructure and, for the first time, systematically measure and analyze transparent forwarders, DNS components that transparently relay between stub resolvers and recursive resolvers. Our key findings include four takeaways. First, transparent forwarders contribute 26% (563k) to the current ODNS infrastructure. Unfortunately, common periodic scanning campaigns such as Shadowserver do not capture transparent forwarders and thus underestimate the current threat potential of the ODNS. Second, we find an increased deployment of transparent forwarders in Asia and South America. In India alone, the ODNS consists of 80% transparent forwarders. Third, many transparent forwarders relay to a few selected public resolvers such as Google and Cloudflare, which confirms a consolidation trend of DNS stakeholders. Finally, we introduce DNSRoute++, a new traceroute approach to understand the network infrastructure connecting transparent forwarders and resolvers.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2021

Spoki: Unveiling a New Wave of Scanners through a Reactive Network Telescope

Large-scale Internet scans are a common method to identify victims of a specific attack. Stateless scanning like in ZMap has been established as an efficient approach to probing at Internet scale. Stateless scans, however, need a second phase to perform the attack, which remains invisible to network telescopes that only capture the first incoming packet and is not observed as a related event by honeypots. In this work, we examine Internet-wide scan traffic through Spoki, a reactive network telescope operating in real-time that we design and implement. Spoki responds to asynchronous TCP SYN packets and engages in TCP handshakes initiated in the second phase of two-phase scans. Because it is extremely lightweight it scales to large prefixes where it has the unique opportunity to record the first data sequence submitted within the TCP handshake ACK. We analyze two-phase scanners during a three months period using globally deployed Spoki reactive telescopes as well as flow data sets from IXPs and ISPs. We find that a predominant fraction of TCP SYNs on the Internet has irregular characteristics. Our findings also provide a clear signature of today's scans as: (i) highly targeted, (ii) scanning activities notably vary between regional vantage points, and (iii) a significant share originates from malicious sources.

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arXiv2021

The Far Side of DNS Amplification: Tracing the DDoS Attack Ecosystem from the Internet Core

In this paper, we shed new light on the DNS amplification ecosystem, by studying complementary data sources, bolstered by orthogonal methodologies. First, we introduce a passive attack detection method for the Internet core, i.e., at Internet eXchange Points (IXPs). Surprisingly, IXPs and honeypots observe mostly disjoint sets of attacks: 96% of IXP-inferred attacks were invisible to a sizable honeypot platform. Second, we assess the effectiveness of observed DNS attacks by studying IXP traces jointly with diverse data from independent measurement infrastructures. We find that attackers efficiently detect new reflectors and purposefully rotate between them. At the same time, we reveal that attackers are a small step away from bringing about significantly higher amplification factors (14x). Third, we identify and fingerprint a major attack entity by studying patterns in attack traces. We show that this entity dominates the DNS amplification ecosystem by carrying out 59% of the attacks, and provide an in-depth analysis of its behavior over time. Finally, our results reveal that operators of various .gov names do not adhere to DNSSEC key rollover best practices, which exacerbates amplification potential. We can verifiably connect this operational behavior to misuses and attacker decision-making.

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arXiv2021

QUICsand: Quantifying QUIC Reconnaissance Scans and DoS Flooding Events

In this paper, we present first measurements of Internet background radiation originating from the emerging transport protocol QUIC. Our analysis is based on the UCSD network telescope, correlated with active measurements. We find that research projects dominate the QUIC scanning ecosystem but also discover traffic from non-benign sources. We argue that although QUIC has been carefully designed to restrict reflective amplification attacks, the QUIC handshake is prone to resource exhaustion attacks, similar to TCP SYN floods. We confirm this conjecture by showing how this attack vector is already exploited in multi-vector attacks: On average, the Internet is exposed to four QUIC floods per hour and half of these attacks occur concurrently with other common attack types such as TCP/ICMP floods.

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arXiv2020

Uncovering Vulnerable Industrial Control Systems from the Internet Core

Industrial control systems (ICS) are managed remotely with the help of dedicated protocols that were originally designed to work in walled gardens. Many of these protocols have been adapted to Internet transport and support wide-area communication. ICS now exchange insecure traffic on an inter-domain level, putting at risk not only common critical infrastructure but also the Internet ecosystem (e.g., DRDoS~attacks). In this paper, we uncover unprotected inter-domain ICS traffic at two central Internet vantage points, an IXP and an ISP. This traffic analysis is correlated with data from honeypots and Internet-wide scans to separate industrial from non-industrial ICS traffic. We provide an in-depth view on Internet-wide ICS communication. Our results can be used i) to create precise filters for potentially harmful non-industrial ICS traffic, and ii) to detect ICS sending unprotected inter-domain ICS traffic, being vulnerable to eavesdropping and traffic manipulation attacks.

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