Abstract
Content Hypergiants deliver the vast majority of Internet traffic to end users. In recent years, some have invested heavily in deploying services and servers inside end-user networks. With several dozen Hypergiants and thousands of servers deployed inside networks, these off-net (meaning outside the Hypergiant networks) deployments change the structure of the Internet. Previous efforts to study them have relied on proprietary data or specialized per-Hypergiant measurement techniques that neither scale nor generalize, providing a limited view of content delivery on today's Internet. In this paper, we develop a generic and easy to implement methodology to measure the expansion of Hypergiants' off-nets. Our key observation is that Hypergiants increasingly encrypt their traffic to protect their customers' privacy. Thus, we can analyze publicly available Internet-wide scans of port 443 and retrieve TLS certificates to discover which IP addresses host Hypergiant certificates in order to infer the networks hosting off-nets for the corresponding Hypergiants. Our results show that the number of networks hosting Hypergiant off-nets has tripled from 2013 to 2021, reaching 4.5k networks. The largest Hypergiants dominate these deployments, with almost all of these networks hosting an off-net for at least one - and increasingly two or more - of Google, Netflix, Facebook, or Akamai. These four Hypergiants have off-nets within networks that provide access to a significant fraction of end user population.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | SIGCOMM 2021 |
Subtitle of host publication | Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference |
Place of Publication | New York |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
Pages | 516-533 |
Number of pages | 18 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-1-4503-8383-7 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2021 |
Event | 2021 Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, SIGCOMM 2021 - Virtual, Online, United States Duration: 23 Aug 2021 → 27 Aug 2021 |
Conference
Conference | 2021 Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, SIGCOMM 2021 |
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Country/Territory | United States |
City | Virtual, Online |
Period | 23/08/21 → 27/08/21 |
Keywords
- content delivery networks
- Hypergiants
- server deployment
- TLS