> Do you know how APNIC/RIPE produces the âhigh-quality BGP-peering graphs for the entire Internetâ? I know that RIPE has been building a pretty large Internet measurement platform called Atlas [3]. I wonder if they are using some of that data.
In short, I don't know this 100%. However, this data is routinely used by network engineers around the world to diagnose routing and other problems. I make the presumption that if the data was wildly inaccurate, the collective funding of RIPE/ARIN/APNIC/etc would necessitate the creation of a better data-stream.
I then make the second leap that, "If it's good enough to be useful Âto the network engineers, it's good enough for Tor incentivization."
I asked the author of vizAS, Byron Ellacott <
bje@xxxxxxxxx>, about the details of the data. Here's what he said:
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The connections in vizAS are the BGP neighbour relationships which are visible in the PATH attribute at the Route Views BGP collector in Oregon. This means that (a) it's not a complete set of peering relationships, as BGP hides information as routes are propagated, and (b) it's only as good as the behaviour of all the routers involved, that is, if a router chooses to lie about its PATH, vizAS will just accept that as truth. As far as I know, most routers don't lie about their PATH, but BGP still only reveals the best paths (for each router's own definition of 'best' to that point) from each ASN, not all of them.
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Right now, it's unclear to me exactly which attacks we wish to mitigate, and someone would concretely articulate which attacks we wish high diversity to harden the Tor network against, that would be immensely helpful in deciding which data to we should leverage. But without knowing what precisely we wish to defend against, I present the vizAS data merely as something I found that, at least on the surface, seems like a reasonable fit for quantifying generic network diversity.
That's what I got.
-V