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On the Accuracy of Country-Level IP Geolocation

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.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ANRW '20: Proceedings of the 2020 Applied Networking Research Workshop
    July 2020
    77 pages
    ISBN:9781450380393
    DOI:10.1145/3404868
    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]

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    Publication History

    Published: 27 July 2020

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    Author Tags

    1. Geolocation Approaches
    2. Geolocation Databases
    3. IP Geolocation

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    July 27 - 30, 2020
    Virtual Event, Spain

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    Cited By

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    • (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
    • (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
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    • (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
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