Tracking Middleboxes in the Mobile World with TraceboxAndroid

摘要

Middleboxes are largely deployed over cellular networks. It is known that they might disrupt network performance, expose users to security issues, and harm protocols deployability. Further, hardly any network measurements tools for smartphones are able to infer middle-box behaviors, specially if one cannot control both ends of a path. In this paper, we present TraceboxAndroid a proof-of-concept measurement application for Android mobile devices implementing the tracebox algorithm. It aims at diagnosing middlebox-impaired paths by detecting and locating rewriting middleboxes. We analyze a dataset sample to highlight the range of opportunities offered by TraceboxAndroid. We show that TraceboxAndroid can be useful for mobile users as well as for the research community.