The objective
of the PowerPing Project is to measure and assess the
relationship between power outages and Internet host liveness. While it seems
obvious that Internet host liveness is impacted by outages in some way, our
goal is to understand the details of this relationship. This research is supervised by Prof. Paul
Barford from the Computer Science Department at the University of Wisconsin –
Madison.
To conduct this
research, we have developed PowerPing – a CloudLab-based platform for Internet host liveness
measurement. PowerPing
perform scans (ICMP pings) of IP addresses that are located in areas of
reported power outages to assess host liveness during those events. Using
publicly available power outage feeds in the US, we identify IP address ranges
that are near the reported power outages. We then send a single ICMP ping once
every 20 minutes to each host in the geographic proximity of the power
outage - but only during power outage incidents. This means ALL of the hosts in
your network may be pinged once from each of the three servers listed above
every 20 minutes during an event.
Our protocol is consistent with prior scan-based research
e.g., from University of Southern California, University of Michigan and others.
At various times, we operate scanning servers from CloudLab located at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, Clemson University, and University of Utah.
Although our ping rates are quite low, sometimes they do trigger a few threshold-based DDoS detectors.
We
have taken great care to ensure we do not interrupt any Internet services, but,
if you would like to opt-out of our research, send the IP address and/or IP
address ranges that you would like us to exclude to the contact listed below.
We will promptly exclude the indicated IP addresses from our research.
Technical
point of contact: Scott
Anderson at standerson4 AT wisc.edu.
Primary point of contact: Paul Barford at pb AT cs.wisc.edu