The RIPE NCC Community Projects Fund opened its call for applications in March 2023. The application period was open for just over 12 weeks, and 54 applications from 26 different countries were submitted to the Selection Committee.
The RIPE NCC Community Projects Fund Selection Committee has reviewed the applications and is happy to announce that the following 6 projects have been selected as the 2023 recipients of the RIPE NCC Community Projects Fund.
Congratulations to the selected projects!
This project is designed to address the challenges faced by universities and junior Principal Investigators (PIs) when conducting large scale active Internet measurements. With a focus on improving the infrastructure, ethical oversight, and practical experience among researchers, the aim is to establish a 'measurement AS'—an open service that provides infrastructure, feedback, and operational support for active measurements. Once established, the governance of this project will be handed over to the scientific network measurement and IT security community to ensure its sustainability and compliance with university 'enterprise' IT systems.
SubZero aims to develop a systematic approach to study the impact of submarine cable system deployment on the performance and resilience of global interconnected networks. Given the significant increase in data traffic and submarine cables over the last decade, the project proposes to collect and evaluate public data concerning the deployment of these cables. The objective is to understand their impact on long-haul delay, network reliance on these cables, and the interdependency among different organisations and countries that these cables foster.
This project acknowledges the fundamental problem of escalating data volume in BGP data collection infrastructures and the inefficiencies faced by its users. It proposes a new design for public BGP route collection infrastructures to increase data coverage and improve user access to relevant data. By deploying more BGP Vantage Points (VPs), applying filters to eliminate redundant routes, designing a new compression algorithm tailored for BGP data, and aiding users in prioritising data processing, the project aims to address the loss of information that currently impacts the quality of network studies.
This project responds to Tor’s network team's call for community projects to trial Arti, Tor’s new protocol implementation in Rust. As the progenitor of Gosling—a protocol and library for peer-to-peer applications running on Tor Onion Services, the project seeks to showcase and test Arti in a real application scenario. Gosling intends to simplify the process for developers to incorporate anonymity features in their applications by providing default end-to-end encryption, anonymity, metadata resistance, and censorship resistance.
Anycast Discovery focuses on daily mapping of the Anycast landscape to enhance Internet resilience. By leveraging existing methods and proposing significant improvements to the MAnycast² approach, the project aims to identify which address prefixes are anycasted and from where, on a larger scale. This includes expanding the coverage beyond ICMP probing to service-aware, non-service-aware measurements and IPv6, building a stable anycast infrastructure, and conducting a daily anycast census to make data publicly available to the community, ultimately bolstering the resilience and stability of critical communications infrastructure.
Recognizing the essential role of time synchronisation in internet security and the shortcomings of existing protocols for IoT devices, this project aims to advance the Roughtime proposed standard. By reigniting efforts to develop an IETF standard for Roughtime, the project aspires to provide a quick and secure method for time synchronisation on IoT devices. Netnod will spearhead this initiative, leveraging expertise from previously successful projects such as the IETF work on the recent NTS Proposed Standard.