2016 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC '16)

Satellite is a methodology, tool chain, and data-set for understanding global trends in website deployment and accessibility using only a single or small number of standard measurement nodes. Satellite collects information on DNS resolution and resource availability around the Internet by probing the IPv4 address space. These measurements are valuable in their breadth and sustainability - they do not require the use of a distributed measurement infrastructure, and therefore can be run at low cost and by multiple organizations. We demonstrate a clustering procedure which accurately captures the IP footprints of CDN deployments, and then show how this technique allows for more accurate determination of correct and incorrect IP resolutions. Satellite has multiple applications. It reveals the prevalence of CDNs by showing that 20% of the top 10,000 Alexa domains are hosted on shared infrastructure, and that CloudFlare alone accounts for nearly 10% of these sites. The same data-set detects 4,819 instances of ISP level DNS hijacking in 117 countries.