Measuring Internet resilience in Ukraine

When Carnegie Mellon master’s students Akshath Jain, Deepayan Patra, and Mike Xu reached out to Department of Computer Science Professor Justine Sherry, asking to take her doctoral level “Computer Networks” course, they never imagined they would end up presenting their course project at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) in France.

During the course, students were introduced to a paper titled, “On Distributed Communications Networks” written by the late Paul Baran in the 1960s, defining the intentional design principles that later work on the Internet would share.

Developed ahead of the Cold War, the Internet’s architects were concerned about an attack on communication infrastructure. In turn, the Internet was deliberately designed to reroute around failures automatically. Using packet switching rather than circuit switching, both technologies used for networking, the Internet can overcome downed routers and links by sending information along alternative paths.

“My students had just learned how the Internet was designed to be resilient during wartime,” said Sherry. “The war in Ukraine offered them a unique opportunity to evaluate whether and to what extent this design goal has been realized.”

“For our final project, we wanted to tackle something relevant,” said Jain. “With the invasion beginning to unfold, we thought, ‘how can we look at this from a networks perspective?’”

The trio began working with Google Research Scientist Phillipa Gill, who works on the company’s Measurement Lab project, an open-source initiative focusing on the global measurement of network performance, to gather data around Ukraine’s Internet performance. 

The students reviewed metrics to determine the extent of network degradation during the first 54 days of the invasion and whether it correlated with where Russian troops were located.

According to the study, Internet performance began degrading almost immediately after the invasion began on February 24, 2022. Researchers say the degradation became even more apparent in the days following, with average packet loss rates increasing by as much as 500% relative to pre-wartime baselines.

Results in the table below illustrate the considerable decrease in test counts and mean download speeds, as well as increases in round-trip time and loss rate within key cities in the conflict.

“The intensity of the degradation correlated with the presence of Russian troops in the region,” said Patra. “But it was clear that in all these cities under attack, there were places where you could still get Internet access.”

The group also analyzed traceroute data, looking for changes in routing through the network. They found modest changes in routing correlated with performance degradation and an increased reliance on international (rather than domestic) Internet service providers for global connectivity.

That said, even in the face of an invasion, the Internet in Ukraine was still largely available and functional. “The ability of the network to rapidly adapt and diversify paths provides evidence of infrastructure resilience,” said Xu.

Paper Reference

 The Ukrainian Internet under attack: an NDT perspective 

• Akshath Jain, Carnegie Mellon University
  Computer Science Department
• Deepayan Patra, Carnegie Mellon University
  Computer Science Department
• Peijing Xu, Carnegie Mellon University
  Computer Science Department
• Justine Sherry, Carnegie Mellon University
  Computer Science Department
  
• Phillipa Gill, Google
  Measurement Lab Project

This study was presented at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference and is available here.