Mining Centralization of Internet Service Infrastructure in the Wild

The last decade has witnessed the rapid evolution of the Internet structure, one of which is centralization, that is, Internet core infrastructure has been constantly transferred into the hands of a few popular market participants. Researchers are trying to measure centrality and analyze its security impact from the perspective of traffic analysis. But the underlying distribution of service providers is still enveloped in mysterious veils. In order to address this problem and assess the security risk associated with such centralization. Firstly, we performed linear regression on the data of each kind of service provider in the Alexa Top 1M domains to study the current underlying distribution of various services for the first time. The results show that Zipf’s law is universal in various service providers’ market share, which proves that Internet service infrastructures are centralized. Secondly, we explored the security impacts of centralized infrastructures on the Internet. we conducted attack simulations on providers. Results show that intentional attacks on core providers can greatly downgrade the performance of the Internet. To make matters worse, the quantitative analysis of the provider’s infrastructures found that a considerable number of provider’s infrastructures have low diversity. In addition, we proposed an algorithm to calculate the dependencies between different types of service providers and carried out an evaluation of our datasets, and found the tendency for different services to depend on each other. Our results indicate that the Internet is facing huge security challenges, because the centralized infrastructure will impair service redundancy, and at the same time, it will also cause dependence between infrastructures, which in turn strengthens its centralization.