Latency-Based Anycast Geolocation: Algorithms, Software, and Datasets

International audienceUse of IP-layer anycast has increased in the last few years beyond the DNS realm. Yet, existing measurement techniques to identify and enumerate anycast replicas exploit specifics of the DNS protocol, which limits their applicability to this particular service. With this paper, we not only propose and thoroughly validate a protocol-agnostic technique for anycast replicas discovery and geolocation, but also provide the community with open source software and datasets to replicate our experimental results, as well as facilitating the development of new techniques such as ours. In particular, our proposed method achieves thorough enumer-ation and city-level geolocalization of anycast instances from a set of known vantage points. The algorithm features an iterative workflow, pipelining enumeration (an optimization problem using latency as input) and geolocalization (a classification problem using side channel information such as city population) of anycast replicas. Results of a thorough validation campaign show our algorithm to be robust to measurement noise, and very lightweight as it requires only a handful of latency measurements