Observing and measuring Internet traffic can tell us a lot about the health and resiliency of Internet locally, regionally and globally. There is a constant increase in global political and social instability which often leads to Internet shutdowns or disruptions. We at the NCC are looking into improving our internet measurement tools so that they can be used to detect, analyze and document these events.
RIPE Atlas is a network of 11000+ globally distributed probes that perform active internet measurements 24/7. It is a community project, data gathered by built-in measurements is open to everyone. Customized measurements could be public or private, as per decision of measurement owner.
If there is a suspected internet shutdown, we might get an insight into what kind of shutdown we're seeing, how the traffic is flowing in and out of the country/region thanks to a high number of vantage points and ability to run custom measurements towards key elements of internet infrastructure (like root DNS servers). We built various tools on top of Atlas, for example IPmap which might also be helpful to visualize traffic flows. Routing Information Service (RIS) - platform for collecting and storing Internet routing data - is another useful NCC tool.
We used Atlas and RIS data to look into resiliency of Ukrainian Internet (https://labs.ripe.net/author/emileaben/the-resilience-of-the-internet-in-ukraine) and how conflict/sanctions affected Russian networks (https://labs.ripe.net/author/emileaben/how-is-russia-connected-to-the-wider-internet).
We are choosing a workshop format because we want to collect feedback from both technical and not-strictly technical people on how to improve our platform and to learn which features might be missing.