Internet Measurements

Why do I receive traffic from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics?

We conduct various regular and ad-hoc Internet-wide scans for application-layer protocols such as HTTPS, SSH or DNS, and transport-layer protocols such as TCP and UDP. These scans are purely scientific and we never attempt to intrude into any system. We follow best practices laid out by the scientific community such as by Dittrich et al. ¹, and Partridge and Allman ².

We never attempt to abuse security vulnerabilities on your system, guess for passwords or upload files to your systems.

We may collect information about your service as far as they are publicly reachable to everybody else on the Internet.

We hope that the data, we are collecting, helps us to understand the Internet better. We are an academic institution and will try to publish all our findings to a wider audience. However, we will never publish parts of our dataset which clearly identifies you or your company.

I do not want to be part of the research. How can I opt out?

You can just block connection attempts from our scanning systems or send us an email and we will add you and your network to our blacklist.

Measurement servers

Contact

If you have further questions about our research, please contact us at inet DASH scans AT mpi DASH inf DOT mpg DOT de.

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References

^{1. D. Dittrich, E. Kenneally et al., “The Menlo Report: Ethical Principles Guiding Information and Communication Technology Research,” US Department of Homeland Security, 2012.↩}

^{2. C. Partridge and M. Allman, “Ethical Considerations in Network Measurement Papers”, Communications of the ACM, 2016.↩}

Imprint / Data Protection