#SIGCOMM 2021 Best paper: "Seven years in the life of Hypergiants' off-nets"
Prof. Georgios Smaragdakis (Cybersecurity group) and colleagues from UCL, Microsoft, Columbia University, and FORTH were awarded the Best paper award in ACM SIGCOMM 2021 for their paper: "Seven Years in the Life of Supergiants' off-nets." SIGCOMM is the ACM flagship conference in Internet Architecture and Networking.
Today, more than 50% of Internet traffic originates from a small number of content providers, called Hypergiants, such as Google, Netflix, Facebook, and Akamai. To cope with the ever-growing demand, Hypergiants have installed servers deep inside residential networks. The award-winning paper provides the first generic and scalable method to discover and characterize these installations in networks around the globe. The study leverages massive public network scan data and analyzes server certificates over the last seven years. The insights gained by this research shed new light on the developments and flow of traffic in the Internet. The artifacts of this work are made publicly available and are expected to help better model the Internet and inform studies in other fields, including economics, statistics, engineering, and law.
