short-paper

Open access

On the Accuracy of Country-Level IP Geolocation

Authors:

Ioana Livadariu,

Thomas Dreibholz,

Anas Saeed Al-Selwi,

Steinar Bjørnstad,

Ahmed ElmokashfiAuthors Info & Claims

ANRW '20: Proceedings of the 2020 Applied Networking Research Workshop

Pages 67 - 73

https://doi.org/10.1145/3404868.3406664

Published: 27 July 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The proliferation of online services comprised of globally spread microservices has security and performance implications. Understanding the underlying physical paths connecting end points has become important. This paper investigates the accuracy of commonly used IP geolocation approaches in geolocating end-to-end IP paths. To this end, we perform a controlled measurement study to collect IP level paths. We find that existing databases tend to geolocate IPs that belong to networks with global presence and those move between networks erroneously. A small percentage of IP geolocation disagreement between databases results in a significant disagreement when geolocating end-to-end paths. Geolocating one week of RIPE traceroute data validates our observations.

References

[1]

Brice Augustin, Xavier Cuvellier, Benjamin Orgogozo, Fabien Viger, Timur Friedman, Matthieu Latapy, Clémence Magnien, and Renata Teixeira. 2006. Avoiding Traceroute Anomalies with Paris Traceroute. In Proc. of ACM IMC.

Digital Library

[2]

CAIDA. [n. d.]. AS classification dataset. ([n. d.]). https://www.caida.org/data/as-classification/.

[3]

Cogent. 2019. Cogent Communications Acquires U.S. Operations of PSINET. (2019). http://www.cogentco.com/en/news/press-releases/279-cogent-communications-acquires-us-operations-of-psinet.

[4]

Cogent: Looking Glass. 2019. (2019). http://www.cogentco.com/en/network/looking-glass.

[5]

Anne Edmundson, Roya Ensafi, Nick Feamster, and Jennifer Rexford. 2016. Characterizing and Avoiding Routing Detours Through Surveillance States. (2016). arXiv:cs.NI/1605.07685

[6]

Manaf Gharaibeh, Anant Shah, Bradley Huffaker, Han Zhang, Roya Ensafi, and Christos Papadopoulos. 2017. A Look at Router Geolocation in Public and Commercial Databases. In Proc. of ACM IMC.

Digital Library

[7]

Andy Greenberg. 2018. The untold story of NotPetya, the most devastating cyberattack in history. Wired, August 22 (2018).

[8]

GTT: Looking Glass. 2019. (2019). www.as3257.net/lg.

[9]

Bamba Gueye, Steve Uhlig, and Serge Fdida. 2007. Investigating the Imprecision of IP Block-based Geolocation. In Proc of PAM (PAM'07).

[10]

B. Gueye, A. Ziviani, M. Crovella, and S. Fdida. 2004. Constraint-Based Geolocation of Internet Hosts. IEEE/ACM ToN 14, 6, 1219--1232.

Digital Library

[11]

Company Histories. 2019. Cogent Communications Group, Inc. (2019). http://www.company-histories.com/Cogent-Communications-Group-Inc-Company-History.html.

[12]

Bradley Huffaker, Marina Fomenkov, and kc claffy. 2014. DRoP:DNS-based Router Positioning. ACM SIGCOMM CCR 44, 3, 6--13.

Digital Library

[13]

IP2Location.com. 2018. IP2Location BD11.LITE (accessed September 2018). (2018). https://lite.ip2location.com/.

[14]

Ethan Katz-Bassett, John P. John, Arvind Krishnamurthy, David Wetherall, Thomas Anderson, and Yatin Chawathe. 2006. Towards IP Geolocation Using Delay and Topology Measurements. In Proc. of ACM IMC.

Digital Library

[15]

Ioana Livadariu, Ahmed Elmokashfi, and Amogh Dhamdhere. 2017. On IPv4 Transfers Markets: Analyzing Reported Transfers and Inferring Transfers In The Wild. Elsevier COMCOM (Oct 2017).

[16]

Matthew Luckie, Bradley Huffaker, and k claffy. 2019. Learning Regexes to Extract Router Names from Hostnames. In Proc. of ACM IMC.

Digital Library

[17]

MaxMind. 2018. Maxmind GeoLite2 databases. (accessed September 2018). (2018). https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/geolite2/.

[18]

Peering DB. [n. d.]. ([n. d.]). https://www.peeringdb.com/.

[19]

Ingmar Poese, Steve Uhlig, Mohamed Ali Kaafar, Benoit Donnet, and Bamba Gueye. 2011. IP Geolocation Databases: Unreliable?. In ACM CCR.

[20]

RIPE NCC. [n. d.]. Allocation and assignment resource file. ([n. d.]). ftp://ftp.ripe.net/pub/stats.

[21]

RIPE NCC. [n. d.]. Data Sets. ([n. d.]). https://labs.ripe.net/datarepository/data-sets.

[22]

RIPE NCC. 2019. RIPE IPmap. (2019). https://ipmap.ripe.net/.

[23]

Quirin Scheitle, Oliver Gasser, Patrick Sattler, and Georg Carle. 2017. HLOC: Hints-based geolocation leveraging multiple measurement frameworks. In Proc. of TMA.

[24]

Anant Shah and Christos Papadopoulos. 2015. Characterizing International BGP Detours. In Technical Report CS-15-104 (Colorado State University).

[25]

Y. Shavitt and N. Zilberman. 2011. A Geolocation Databases Study. IEEE JSAC 29, 10, 2044--2056.

[26]

Neil Spring, Ratul Mahajan, and David Wetherall. 2002. Measuring ISP Topologies with Rocketfuel. In Proc of ACM SIGCOMM.

Digital Library

[27]

Yong Wang, Daniel Burgener, Marcel Flores, Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, and Cheng Huang. 2011. Octant: A Comprehensive Framework for the Geolocalization of Internet Hosts. In Proc. of USENIX NSDI (NSDI'11).

Cited By

Ramesh RWinter PKorman SEnsafi RBalzarotti DXu W(2024)CalcuLatencyProceedings of the 33rd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3698900.3699027(2263-2280)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3698900.3699027
Hong RAgnew WKohno TMorgenstern J(2024)Who's in and who's out? A case study of multimodal CLIP-filtering in DataCompProceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization10.1145/3689904.3694702(1-17)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689904.3694702
Livadariu IVermeulen KMouchet MGiotsas V(2024)Geofeeds: Revolutionizing IP Geolocation or Illusionary Promises?Proceedings of the ACM on Networking10.1145/36768692:CoNEXT3(1-21)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3676869
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

On the Accuracy of Country-Level IP Geolocation
1. Networks
  1. Network performance evaluation
    1. Network measurement

Recommendations

IP Geolocation through Geographic Clicks
IP geolocation databases map IP addresses to their physical locations. They are used to determine the location of online users when their precise location is unavailable. These databases are vital for a number of online services, including search engine ...
IP Geolocation Using Traceroute Location Propagation and IP Range Location Interpolation
WWW '21: Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021

Many online services, including search engines, content delivery networks, ad networks, and fraud detection utilize IP geolocation databases to map IP addresses to their physical locations. However, IP geolocation databases are often inaccurate. We ...
A look at router geolocation in public and commercial databases
IMC '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference

Internet measurement research frequently needs to map infrastructure components, such as routers, to their physical locations. Although public and commercial geolocation services are often used for this purpose, their accuracy when applied to network ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ANRW '20: Proceedings of the 2020 Applied Networking Research Workshop

July 2020

77 pages

ISBN:9781450380393

DOI:10.1145/3404868

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

IRTF: Internet Research Task Force
Internet Society: Internet Society
SIGCOMM: ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 July 2020

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Short-paper
Research
Refereed limited

Conference

ANRW '20

Sponsor:

IRTF
Internet Society
SIGCOMM

ANRW '20: Applied Networking Research Workshop

July 27 - 30, 2020

Virtual Event, Spain

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 34 of 58 submissions, 59%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

20
Total Citations
View Citations
1,235
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)326
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)35

Reflects downloads up to 12 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Ramesh RWinter PKorman SEnsafi RBalzarotti DXu W(2024)CalcuLatencyProceedings of the 33rd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3698900.3699027(2263-2280)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3698900.3699027
Hong RAgnew WKohno TMorgenstern J(2024)Who's in and who's out? A case study of multimodal CLIP-filtering in DataCompProceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization10.1145/3689904.3694702(1-17)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689904.3694702
Livadariu IVermeulen KMouchet MGiotsas V(2024)Geofeeds: Revolutionizing IP Geolocation or Illusionary Promises?Proceedings of the ACM on Networking10.1145/36768692:CoNEXT3(1-21)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3676869
Du BFontugne RTestart CSnoeren Aclaffy kVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)Sublet Your Subnet: Inferring IP Leasing in the WildProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3689010(328-336)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3689010
Lin JLi CGong WSong GFan LWang ZYang J(2024)ProbeGeo: A Comprehensive Landmark Mining Framework Based on Web ContentIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2024.342208932:5(4398-4413)Online publication date: Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2024.3422089
Song PLee JAbdelmoniem AMukhanov L(2024)Do 5G Networks Achieve The Proclaimed Promises? An Empirical Study Using YouTube Edge Service2024 IEEE International Conference on Edge Computing and Communications (EDGE)10.1109/EDGE62653.2024.00014(29-34)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/EDGE62653.2024.00014
Ahmadzadeh SPokhrel SRahul Kumar Jha Karthick GRebecca Jeyavadhanam Balasundaram Ling S(2023)Exploring the Impact of COVID on Global Telecommunication Networks and ICT SolutionsRecent Research Reviews Journal10.36548/rrrj.2023.2.0182:2(480-498)Online publication date: Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.36548/rrrj.2023.2.018
Xie YZhang ZLiu YChen ELi N(2023)Evaluation Method of IP Geolocation Database Based on City Delay CharacteristicsElectronics10.3390/electronics1301001513:1(15)Online publication date: 19-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13010015
TOYOTA YMISHIMA WKANAYA KNAKAMURA O(2023)Performance Aware Egress Path Discovery for Content Provider with SRv6 Egress Peer EngineeringIEICE Transactions on Information and Systems10.1587/transinf.2022NTP0003E106.D:5(927-939)Online publication date: 1-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1587/transinf.2022NTP0003
Carisimo EWang CWeaver MBustamante FBarford P(2023)A Hop Away from Everywhere: A View of the Intercontinental Long-haul InfrastructureProceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems10.1145/36267787:3(1-26)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626778
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten