The perfect
map a large technological network and provide a ‘snapshot’ of its topology that
can be studied in a small computer program or even manually by looking at a
graphical representation. Getting an idea of how such a network grows and copes
with errors and malicious attacks.
The idea is
to somehow map a physical part of the internet by gathering a, preferably
large, amount of ip-addresses and find a route through each of them identifying
all routers and links in between. This data can then be used to calculate
distances, vulnerability, link-distribution etc… to find out how the Internet will
increase in size, how will performance be affected when every tiny little
device has it’s own address, how does it handle breakdowns etc…
Ip
addresses can be gathered by a simple web-spider (aka crawler) software that
downloads a page, identifies links using simple regular expressions, extracts
the host part of the link for tracing and follow the link to a new page where
the process is repeated.
Finding the
routers in between can be done with the “tracert” tool included in some form in
all modern operating systems.
Once a list
of links is gathered it will be easy to perform calculations using regular
graph parsing algorithms.