Time Analysis Research Opportunities

I am working on a project involving the analysis of time on the Internet. We have identified the following sub-projects. Please email me if you are interested:

Time Acquisition Infrastructure Development

We have created a system for monitoring and recording the time of servers on the Internet. Currently the system uses a multi-threaded acquisition program written in Python that can query 10 hosts/sec and store the results in an SQL server. We need to scale up this system so that it can:

• Scan more systems faster
• Store information in the database more efficiently
• Split the database, so analysis does not interfere with acquisition
• Reliably detect and report infrastructure problems.
• Easily ramp up new analysis modes
• Solid tools for database management

Time Analysis Infrastructure and GUI Development

We be have created a system that stores information about server clock drift in a database. We have created a single visualization. We need tools to make analysis faster, more efficient, and more powerful. We are specifically looking to do the following:

• Develop an efficient web-based analysis API, so that analysis can built into web pages and apps.

Improving acquisition techniques

Develop plug-in tools for measuring the time of remote systems. We currently have the ability to measure the system clocks of web servers and NTP servers. The time of mail servers can be measured by sending the mail server a message that will bounce and analyzing the returned headers. However, we can measure the system clock of any server that uses a protocol that embeds the time as a nounce. What other protocols can be measured?

Finding embedded time and location information

What file formats embed timestamps and locations? Find them, and develop tools for them.