News

IMC 2026: TTL Jumps

May 06, 2026

Our paper “TTL Jumps: Unexpected TTL Rewrites Impacting Inferences from Traceroutes” was accepted at IMC’26.

We show that TTL jumps exist on the Internet: some devices rewrite the TTL, often to larger value of up to 255. These rewrites hide the remaining path from traceroute and can lead to incorrect inferences like spurious router and Autonomous System (AS) links. Based on controlled experiments and public data from RIPE Atlas and CAIDA Ark, we show that at least 47 ASes are impacted by path-impairing devices that rewrite the TTL.

NOMS 2026: Kernel Bypass

May 06, 2026

Our paper “Kernel Bypass Surgery: A Viable Procedure for Maximizing QUIC Bandwidth?” was accepted at NOMS’26.

We investigate the impact of kernel bypass on performance. We integrated the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) into three QUIC implementations, bypassing their use of the kernel networking stack, and updated a fourth stack that previous work combined with DPDK. Our analysis shows that kernel bypass can greatly increase the goodput achieved with QUIC, with a speedup reaching up to a factor of 3× and goodput over 10 GBit/s. However, the reachable performance increase highly depends on the implementation, and in one case performance did also not further increase when using DPDK. All implementations and artifacts are available.

KuVS Dissertation Award

May 05, 2026

My dissertation “Detecting and Evaluating QUIC Deployments as Part of the Internet Ecosystem” was awarded the KuVS Dissertation Award 2025.

Max Planck Institue for Informatics

October 01, 2024

After five successful years as PhD student at the Technical University of Munich, I started a new position at the Internet Architectures group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics.

IPv6 Hitlist Extension

July 17, 2023

Two weeks Lion Steger presented our latest insights and extensions to the IPv6 Hitlist Service at TMA 2023 and received the best paper award. The work categorized the Hitlist based on network types and evaluated target generation algorithms under different conditions. The paper is avaialable for more information. We further added a new historic and ongoing categorization as part of the Hitlist service for everybody to use. New responsive addresses will also be visible shortly.

QUIC Interest Group and IFIP 2023

May 05, 2023

Together with a colleague, I founded a QUIC Interest Group that brings together researchers and students with an interest in QUIC. Interests cover performance measurements, the analysis of different libraries but also Internet-wide measurements to evaluate QUIC deployments.

An outcome of this group, a performance evaluation of different libraries on a 10G link has been accepted to be published at IFIP Networking 2023. You can find a preprint of this work here

PAM 2023

February 01, 2023

One of our papers has been accepted to the PAM 2023.

APNIC blog: An investigation into Apple’s new Relay network

January 25, 2023

Patrick Sattler wrote a nice post on the APNIC blog about our recent investigation into Apple’s new Relay network iCloud Private Relay. Checkout our IMC 2022 publication for more information.

IPv6 Hitlist Service

July 20, 2022

Alongside our IMC 2022 publication we updated the IPv6 Hitlist Service. We deployed the following updates:

• We removed all responses to the UDP/53 scan injected by the Great Firewall of China (historically and for future scans)
• We added new sources increasing the number of responsive addresses by roughly 5 Million to 7.2 Million. Most addresses are from different target generation algorithms but also new passive sources.

We furthermore suggest that research relying on the IPv6 Hitlist evaluate whether addresses from fully responsive prefixes (aliased prefixes) should be included. For more information, we refer to our paper.