A Hands-on Look at Active Probing Using the IP Prespecified Timestamp Option

In the last years, network measurements have shown a growing interest in active probing techniques. Recent works propose approaches based on the IP prespecified timestamp option and consider its support to be enough for their purposes. On the other hand, other works found that IP options are usually filtered, poorly implemented, or not widely supported. In this paper, to shed light on this controversial topic, we investigate the responsiveness obtained targeting more than 1.7

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IPs using several probes (ICMP, UDP, TCP, and SKIP ), with and without the IP prespecified timestamp option. Our results show that: (i) the option has a significant impact on the responsiveness to the probes; (ii) a not−negligible amount of targeted addresses return several categories of non RFC−compliant replies; (iii) by considering only the RFC−compliant replies which preserve the option, the probes ranking by responsiveness considerably changes. Finally, we discuss the large−scale applicability of two proposed techniques based on the IP prespecified timestamp option.