Guidelines for Performing Safe Measurement on the Internet

Performing research using the Internet, as opposed to an isolated testbed or simulation platform, means that experiments co-exist in a space with other users. This document outlines guidelines for academic and industry researchers that might use the Internet as part of scientific experimentation to mitigate risks to the safety of other users.

Following the guidelines contained within this document is not a substitute for any institutional ethics review process, although these guidelines could help to inform that process. Similarly, these guidelines are not legal advice and local laws must also be considered before starting any experiment that could have adverse impacts on user safety.

Internet measurement studies can be broadly categorized into two groups: active measurements and passive measurements. Active measurements generate traffic. Performance measurements such as TCP throughput testing or functional measurements such as the feature-dependent connectivity failure tests performed by both fall into this category. Performing passive measurements requires existing traffic. Both active and passive measurements carry risk. A poorly considered active measurement could result in an inadvertent denial-of-service attack, while passive measurements could result in serious violations of user privacy. The type of measurement is not truly binary and many studies will include both active and passive components. Each of the considerations in this document must be carefully considered for their applicability regardless of the type of measurement.

In an ideal world, informed consent would be collected from all users that may be placed at risk, no matter how small a risk, by an experiment. In cases where it is practical to do so, this should be done.

For consent to be informed, all possible risks must be presented to the users. The considerations in this document can be used to provide a starting point although other risks may be present depending on the nature of the measurements to be performed.

A researcher would like to use volunteer owned mobile devices to collect information about local Internet censorship. Connections will be made from the volunteer's device towards known or suspected blocked webpages. This experiment can carry substantial risk for the user depending on the circumstances, from disciplinary action from their employer to arrest or imprisonment. Fully informed consent ensures that any risk that is being taken has been carefully considered by the volunteer before proceeding.

In cases where it is not practical to collect informed consent from all users of a shared network, it may be possible to obtain proxy consent. Proxy consent may be given by a network operator or employer that would be more familiar with the expectations of users of a network than the researcher. In some cases, a network operator or employer may have terms of service that specifically allow for giving consent to 3rd parties to perform certain experiments.

A researcher would like to perform a packet capture to determine the TCP options and their values used by all client devices on an corporate wireless network. The employer may already have terms of service laid out that allow them to provide proxy consent for this experiment on behalf of the employees (the users of the network). The purpose of the experiment may affect whether or not they are able to provide this consent. For example, to perform engineering work on the network then it may be allowed, whereas academic research may not be covered.

In larger scale measurements, even proxy consent collection may not be practical. In this case, implied consent may be presumed from users for some measurements. Consider that users of a network will have certain expectations of privacy and those expectations may not align with the privacy guarantees offered by the technologies they are using. As a thought experiment, consider how users might respond if asked for their informed consent for the measurements you'd like to perform. Implied consent should not be considered sufficient for any experiment that may collect sensitive or personally identifying information. If practical, attempt to obtain informed consent or proxy consent from a sample of users to better understand the expectations of other users.

A researcher would like to run a measurement campaign to determine the maximum supported TLS version on popular web servers. The operator of a web server that is exposed to the Internet hosting a popular website would have the expectation that it may be included in surveys that look at supported protocols or extensions but would not expect that attempts be made to degrade the service with large numbers of simultaneous connections.

A researcher would like to perform A/B testing for protocol feature and how it affects web performance. They have created two versions of their software and have instrumented both to report telemetry back. These updates will be pushed to users at random by the software's auto-update framework. The telemetry consists only of performance metrics and does not contain any personally identifying or sensitive information. As users expect to receive automatic updates, the effect of changing the behaviour of the software is already expected by the user. If users have already been informed that data will be reported back to the developers of the software, then again the addition of new metrics would be expected. There are risks in pushing any new software update, and the A/B testing technique can reduce the number of users that may be adversely affected by a bad update. The reduced impact should not be used as an excuse for pushing higher risk updates, only updates that could be considered appropriate to push to all users should be A/B tested. Likewise, not pushing the new behaviour to any user should be considered appropriate if some users are to remain with the old behavior. In the event that something does go wrong with the update, it should be easy for a user to discover that they have been part of an experiment and roll back the change, allowing for explicit refusal of consent to override the presumed implied consent.

Wherever possible, use a testbed. An isolated network means that there are no other users sharing the infrastructure you are using for your experiments. When measuring performance, competing traffic can have negative effects on the performance of your test traffic and so the testbed approach can also produce more accurate and repeatable results than experiments using the public Internet. WAN link conditions can be emulated through artificial delays and/or packet loss using a tool like . Competing traffic can also be emulated using traffic generators.

When performing active measurements be sure to only capture traffic that you have generated. Traffic may be identified by IP ranges or by some token that is unlikely to be used by other users. Again, this can help to improve the accuracy and repeatability of your experiment. , for performance benchmarking, requires that any frames received that were not part of the test traffic are discarded and not counted in the results.

If your experiment is designed to trigger a response from infrastructure that is not your own, consider what the negative consequences of that may be. At the very least your experiment will consume bandwidth that may have to be paid for. In more extreme circumstances, you could cause traffic to be generated that causes legal trouble for the owner of that infrastructure. The Internet is a global network crossing many legal jurisdictions and so what may be legal for you is not necessarily legal for everyone. If you are sending a lot of traffic quickly, or otherwise generally deviate from typical client behaviour, a network may identify this as an attack which means that you will not be collecting results that are representative of what a typical client would see.

When performing active measurements on a shared network, maintain a list of hosts that you will never scan regardless of whether they appear in your target lists. When developing tools for performing active measurement, or traffic generation for use in a larger measurement system, ensure that the tool will support the use of a "Do Not Scan" list. If complaints are made that request you do not generate traffic towards a host or network, you must add that host or network to your "Do Not Scan" list, even if no explanation is given or the request is automated. You may ask the requester for their reasoning if it would be useful to your experiment. This can also be an opportunity to explain your research and offer to share any results that may be of interest. If you plan to share the reasoning when publishing your measurement results, e.g. in an academic paper, you must seek consent for this from the requester. Be aware that in publishing your measurement results, it may be possible to infer your "Do Not Scan" list from those results. For example, if you measured a well-known list of popular websites then it would be possible to correlate the results with that list to determine which are missing.

When deciding on the data to collect, assume that any data collected might become public. There are many ways that this could happen, through operation security mistakes or compulsion by a judicial system.

For all data collected, consider whether or not it is really needed.

When collecting data, consider if the granularity can be limited by using bins or adding noise. XXX: Differential privacy.

Do this at the source, definitely do it before you write to disk. presents a case-study on the in-memory statistics in the software used by the Tor network, as an example.

The benefits should outweigh the risks. Consider auxiliary data (e.g. third-party data sets) when assessing the risks.

Take reasonable security precautions, e.g. about who has access to your data sets or experimental systems.

This document has no actions for IANA.

Many of these considerations are based on those from the adapted and generalised to be applied to Internet research. Other considerations are taken from the Menlo Report and its companion document .