One Primitive to Diagnose Them All: Architectural Support for Internet Diagnostics

Today, network operators are increasingly playing the role of part-time detectives: they must routinely diagnose intricate problems and malfunctions, e.g., routing or performance issues, and they must often perform forensic investigations of past misbehavior, e.g., intrusions or cybercrimes. However, the current Internet architecture offers little direct support for them. A variety of solutions have been proposed, but each solution tends to address only one specific problem. Moreover, each solution proposes a different fix that is incompatible with the others, which complicates deployment. In this paper, we make the observation that most of the existing solutions share a common "functional core", which suggests that it may be possible to add a single primitive to the Internet architecture that can support a wide variety of diagnostic and forensic tasks. We then present one specific candidate that we call secure packet provenance (SPP). We show that SPP is easy to add to the current architecture, that it can be implemented efficiently in both software and hardware, and that it can be used to approximate (and sometimes surpass) the capabilities offered by a variety of existing diagnostic and forensic systems.