Have you ever wondered how a change in one of the Internet's protocols affects its users? How Internet traffic varies between day and night, weekdays and weekends, school holidays and exam periods? If some Internet companies really are too big to fail? You are not the only one. Measuring the Internet is vital to keeping the Internet stable and secure, and to inform policy for the Internet community and governments.

The Internet Measurements course will teach you everything about global, Internet-scale measurements, based on state-of-the art research done at the university. We will explain basic measurement concepts, such as the difference between passive measurements (where you just observe ongoing network traffic) and active measurements (where you actively send probes). We will discuss the ethics of Internet measurements, using censorship measurements and botnet-based measurements that the academic community found questionable. We will be using state-of-the-art big data analysis techniques, such as Apache Spark, to work with some of the very large datasets collected by the OpenINTEL measurement project (https://openintel.nl/). And right from the start, you will be designing your own Internet-scale measurement together with a group of students, to answer your own questions about the whys, hows and whats of the global Internet.

There will be traditional classroom lectures, supplemented by (video) lectures and background information provided via our MOOC platform based on Open EdX. Grading is based on individual exercises via the MOOC platform, a group assignment to design an Internet-scale measurement and a short written final exam.

Prerequisites
A basic understanding of layered communication protocols/systems. This is covered in: Network Systems ( 202001026 / module 3 B-TCS).

The course Empirical Security Analysis and Engineering (202100073) is a natural continuation for students interested in both security and empirical work.