Abstract

Abstract. Traceroute is one of the most famous and widely adopted di-agnostic tool for computer networks. Although traceroute is often used to infer links between Autonomous Systems (ASes), the presence of the so-called third-party (TP) addresses may induce the inference of false AS-level links. In this paper, we propose a novel active probing tech-nique based on the IP timestamp option able to identify TP addresses. For evaluating both the applicability and the utility of the proposed technique, we perform a large-scale measurement campaign targeting – from multiple vantage points – more than 327K destinations belonging to about 14K ASes. The results show how TP addresses are very com-mon and affect about 17 % of AS-level links extracted from traceroute traces. Compared to a previously proposed heuristic method, our tech-nique allows to identify many more TP addresses and to re-interpret part of its results. 1