Privacy-preserving performance measurements

Abstract

Internet performance is an issue of great interest, but it is not trivial to measure. A number of commercial companies try to measure this, as does RIPE, and many individual Internet Service Providers. However, all are hampered in their efforts by a fear of sharing such sensitive information. Customers make decision about "which provider" based on such measurements, and so service providers certainly do not want such data to be public (except in the case of the top provider), but at the same time, it is in everyones' interest to have good metrics in order to reduce the risk of large network problems, and to test the effect of proposed network improvements.This paper shows that it is possible to have your cake, and eat it too. Providers (and other interested parties) can make such measurements, and compute Internet-wide metrics securely in the knowledge that their private data is never shared, and so cannot be abused.