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ABSTRACT The goal of this article is to offer framing for conversations about the role of measurement in informing public policy about the Internet. We review different stakeholders’ approaches to measurements and associated challenges, including the activities of U.S. government agencies. We show how taxonomies of existing harms can facilitate the search for clarity along the fraught path from identifying to measuring harms. Looking forward, we identify barriers to advancing our empirical grounding of Internet infrastructure to inform policy, societal challenges that create pressure to overcome these barriers, and steps that could facilitate measurement to support policymaking. 

Mutually Agreed Norms on Routing Security (MANRS) is an industry-led initiative to improve Internet routing security by encouraging participating networks to implement a series of mandatory or recommended actions. MANRS members must register their IP prefixes in a trusted routing database and use such information to prevent propagation of invalid routing information. MANRS membership has increased significantly in recent years, but the impact of the MANRS initiative on the overall Internet routing security remains unclear. In this paper, we provide the first independent look into the MANRS ecosystem by using publicly available data to analyze the routing behavior of participant networks. We quantify MANRS participants' level of conformance with the stated requirements, and compare the behavior of MANRS and non-MANRS networks. While not all MANRS members fully comply with all required actions, we find that they are more likely to implement routing security practices described in MANRS actions. We assess the relevance of the MANRS effort in securing the overall routing ecosystem. We found that as of May 2022, over 83% of MANRS networks were conformant to the route filtering requirement by dropping BGP messages with invalid information according to authoritative records, and over 95% were conformant to the routing information facilitation requirement, registering their resources in authoritative databases. 

In 2019, the US Department of Homeland Security issued an emergency warning about DNS infrastructure tampering. This alert, in response to a series of attacks against foreign government websites, highlighted how a sophisticated attacker could leverage access to key DNS infrastructure to then hijack traffic and harvest valid login credentials for target organizations. However, even armed with this knowledge, identifying the existence of such incidents has been almost entirely via post hoc forensic reports (i.e., after a breach was found via some other method). Indeed, such attacks are particularly challenging to detect because they can be very short lived, bypass the protections of TLS and DNSSEC, and are imperceptible to users. Identifying them retroactively is even more complicated by the lack of fine-grained Internet-scale forensic data. This paper is a first attempt to make progress at this latter goal. Combining a range of longitudinal data from Internet-wide scans, passive DNS records, and Certificate Transparency logs, we have constructed a methodology for identifying potential victims of sophisticated DNS infrastructure hijacking and have used it to identify a range of victims (primarily government agencies), both those named in prior reporting, and others previously unknown.