The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has awarded $1.4 million grant to the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) , directed by SDSC research scientist and CSE adjunct professor KC Claffy. The funding will allow CAIDA to expand Archipelago Measurement Infrastructure (with worldwide nodes as depicted in the map below). Archipelago is a secure platform for measuring the Internet’s vulnerabilities to cyber attacks and for other large-scale active measurement studies of the global Internet.
UC San Diego’s CAIDA will receive the funding to make Archipelago larger and more capable. “The Internet has grown organically and there are many things yet to be discovered,” said Ann Cox, program manager in DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate. “The knowledge developed in this project will enable better defenses for critical infrastructure that is tied to the Internet.” The project is funded under DHS’s Internet Measurement and Attack Modeling initiative to support network measurement and mapping as well as modeling of cyber attacks and development of resilient systems.
The Archipelago infrastructure consists of distributed hardware measurement nodes (mostly second-generation Raspberry Pi’s) that are geographically and topologically diverse to improve CAIDA’s view of the global Internet. The project is also meant to accelerate development of a community-oriented measurement infrastructure by allowing collaborators to run their vetted measurement tasks on a security-hardened distributed platform.