Wrinkles in Time: Detecting Internet-wide Events via NTP

Abstract

Understanding the nature and characteristics of Internet events such as route changes and outages can serve as the starting point for improvements in network configurations, management and monitoring practices. However, the scale, diversity, and dynamics of network infrastructure makes event detection and analysis challenging. In this paper, we describe a new approach to Internet event measurement, identification and analysis that provides a broad and detailed perspective without the need for new or dedicated infrastructure or additional network traffic. Our approach is based on analyzing data that is readily available from Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers. NTP is one of the few on-by-default services on clients, thus NTP servers have a broad perspective on Internet behavior. We develop a tool for analyzing NTP traces called Tezzeract, which applies Robust Principal Components Analysis to detect Internet events. We demonstrate Tezzeract’s efficacy by conducting controlled experiments and by applying it to data collected over a period of 3 months from 19 NTP servers. We also compare and contrast Tezzeract’s perspective with reported outages and events identified through active probing. We find that while there is commonality across methods, NTP-based monitoring provides a unique perspective that complements prior methods.