Glasnost: Enabling End Users to Detect Traffic Differentiation

Holding residential ISPs to their contractual or legal obligations of "unlimited service" or "network neutrality" is hard because their traffic management policies are opaque to end users and governmental regulatory agencies. We have built and deployed Glasnost, a system that improves network transparency by enabling ordinary Internet users to detect whether their ISPs are differentiating between flows of specific applications. We identify three key challenges in designing such a system: (a) to attract many users, the system must have low barrier of use and generate results in a timely manner, (b) the results must be robust to measurement noise and avoid false accusations of differentiation, which can adversely affect ISPs' reputation and business, (c) the system must include mechanisms to keep it up-to-date with the continuously changing differentiation policies of ISPs worldwide. We describe how Glasnost addresses each of these challenges. Glasnost has been ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: NSDI
• Authors: Marcel Dischinger, Massimiliano Marcon, Saikat Guha, P. Krishna Gummadi, Ratul Mahajan, Stefan Saroiu
• Keywords: Computer Networks, Glasnost, Individual Glasnost Users, ISPs, NSDI 2010