The Internet Mapping Project was started by William Cheswick and Hal Burch at Bell Labs in 1997. It has collected and preserved traceroute-style paths to some hundreds of thousands of networks almost daily since 1998. The project included visualization of the Internet data, and the Internet maps were widely disseminated. The technology is now used by Lumeta, a spinoff of Bell Labs, to map corporate and government networks. Although Cheswick left Lumeta in September 2006, Lumeta continues to map both the IPv4 and IPv6 Internet. The data allows for both a snapshot and view over time of the routed infrastructure of a particular geographical area, company, organization, etc. Cheswick continues to collect and preserve the data, and it is available for research purposes. According to Cheswick, a main goal of the project was to collect the data over time, and make a time-lapse movie of the growth of the Internet. Today, Lumeta and many organizations such as Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis continue internet mapping, which is the study of the physical connectivity of the Internet. They collect, monitor, analyze, and visualize several forms of Internet traffic data concerning network topology. This data is used for a variety of applications in business and society.
Techniques
Currently, all the techniques now available for network discovery rely on hop-limited probes of the type used by the Unixtraceroute utility or the Windows NT tracert.exe tool. A Traceroute-style network probe follows the path that network packets take from a source node to a destination node. This technique uses Internet Protocol packets with an 8-bit Time to Live header field. As a packet passes through routers on the Internet, each router decreases the TTL value by one until it reaches zero. When a router receives a packet with a TTL value of zero, it drops the packet instead of forwarding it. At this point, it sends an Internet Control Message Protocol error message to the source node where the packet originated indicating that the packet exceeded its maximum transit time. Active Probing – Active probing is a series of probes set out through a network to obtain data. Active probing is used in internet mapping to discover the topology of the Internet. Topology maps of the Internet are an important tool for characterizing the infrastructure and understanding the properties, behavior and evolution of the Internet.
Lumeta has enabled companies to map IPv4 and IPv6 Internet user’s data and networks through its software. There are many companies that have partnered with Lumeta in order to integrate internet mapping into their business applications:
HP: Lumeta's technology partnership with HP ArcSight has led to an integration of IPsonar® data into the HP ArcSight Product Suite. Joint customers will benefit by having IPsonar discover additional security events, previous unknown network connectivity and improperly configured network defenses, which are automatically reported into ArcSight products.
Infoblox: Infoblox is a provider of integrated DNS, DHCP, IP Address Management and Network Change & Configuration Management products. Infoblox makes networks available, makes networks secure, and makes networks automated.
Juniper: In 2013, Lumeta announced a Technology Development Partnership regarding Juniper Networks Contrail, a standards-based and highly scalable network virtualization solution for software-defined networks. IPsonar ESI enables continuous cyber situational awareness for cloud and virtualized network environments.
McAfee: Through a technology partnership, Lumeta has integrated IPsonar with McAfee Foundstone. McAfee Foundstone advises enterprises on the best ways to protect assets and maximize business goals through maintaining a strong security posture.
Qualys, Inc.: Lumeta has grown Qualys, Inc. to becoma a leading provider of Software-as-a-Service IT security risk and compliance management solutions.
Tripwire: Tripwire is a leading provider of risk security and compliance management solutions, which allow enterprises to easily and effectively connect security to their business.
Other internet mapping projects
Hand Drawn Maps of Internet from 1973.
New Hampshire Project – In 2010, the U.S. Department of Commerce has awarded the University of New Hampshire's Geographically Referenced Analysis and Information Transfer project approximately $1.7 million to manage a program that will inventory and map current and planned broadband coverage available to the state's businesses, educators, and citizens. As a part of this project, The New Hampshire Broadband Mapping Program was created as a coordinated, multi-agency initiative funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and is part of a national effort to expand high-speed Internet access and adoption through improved data collection and broadband planning.
Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired Magazine started his own Internet Mapping Project to understand how people conceive the internet. He wanted to discover the maps that people have in their mind as they navigate the vast internet by having them submit hand drawn pictures. So far, he has collected close to 80 submissions by people of all ages, nationalities and expertise levels, ranging from the concrete to the conceptual to the comic.
