Research - Valid Data Gathering vs Annoying Others

Fri Aug 6 18:09:01 UTC 2004

Hi NANOG folks,

We have a situation (which has come up in the past) that I'd like some 
opinions on.

Periodically, we have researchers who develop projects which will do 
things like randomly port probe off-campus addresses.  The most recent 
instance of this is a group studying "bottlenecks" on the internet.  Thus, 
they hit hosts (again, semi-randomly) on both the commodity internet and 
on I2 (abeline) to look for places where there is "traffic congestion".

The problem is that many of their "random targets" consider the probes to 
be either malicious in nature, or outright attacks.  As a result of this, 
we, of course, get complaints.

One suggestion that I received fro a co-worker to help to mitigate this is 
to have the researchers run the experiments off of a www host, and to have 
the default page explain the experiment and also provide contact info.

We also discussed having the researchers contact ISPs and other large 
providers to see if they can get permission to use addresses in their 
space as targets, and then providing the ISPs with info from the testing.

How do you view the issue of experiments that probe random sites?  Should 
this be accepted as "reasonable", or should it be disallowed?  Something 
in between?

What other suggestions might you have about how such experiments could be 
run without triggering alarms?

Please send any suggestions directly to me and once I have some answers, 
I'll post a compilation to the list.

Thanks!

John

John K. Lerchey
Computer and Network Security Coordinator
Computing Services
Carnegie Mellon University