33 research outputs found
HLOC: Hints-Based Geolocation Leveraging Multiple Measurement Frameworks
Geographically locating an IP address is of interest for many purposes. There
are two major ways to obtain the location of an IP address: querying commercial
databases or conducting latency measurements. For structural Internet nodes,
such as routers, commercial databases are limited by low accuracy, while
current measurement-based approaches overwhelm users with setup overhead and
scalability issues. In this work we present our system HLOC, aiming to combine
the ease of database use with the accuracy of latency measurements. We evaluate
HLOC on a comprehensive router data set of 1.4M IPv4 and 183k IPv6 routers.
HLOC first extracts location hints from rDNS names, and then conducts
multi-tier latency measurements. Configuration complexity is minimized by using
publicly available large-scale measurement frameworks such as RIPE Atlas. Using
this measurement, we can confirm or disprove the location hints found in domain
names. We publicly release HLOC's ready-to-use source code, enabling
researchers to easily increase geolocation accuracy with minimum overhead.Comment: As published in TMA'17 conference:
http://tma.ifip.org/main-conference
Decentralization in Bitcoin and Ethereum Networks
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have demonstrated how to securely implement
traditionally centralized systems, such as currencies, in a decentralized
fashion. However, there have been few measurement studies on the level of
decentralization they achieve in practice. We present a measurement study on
various decentralization metrics of two of the leading cryptocurrencies with
the largest market capitalization and user base, Bitcoin and Ethereum. We
investigate the extent of decentralization by measuring the network resources
of nodes and the interconnection among them, the protocol requirements
affecting the operation of nodes, and the robustness of the two systems against
attacks. In particular, we adapted existing internet measurement techniques and
used the Falcon Relay Network as a novel measurement tool to obtain our data.
We discovered that neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum has strictly better properties
than the other. We also provide concrete suggestions for improving both
systems.Comment: Financial Cryptography and Data Security 201
Measuring the Relationships between Internet Geography and RTT
When designing distributed systems and Internet protocols, designers can benefit from statistical models of the Internet that can be used to estimate their performance. However, it is frequently impossible for these models to include every property of interest. In these cases, model builders have to select a reduced subset of network properties, and the rest will have to be estimated from those available. In this paper we present a technique for the analysis of Internet round trip times (RTT) and its relationship with other geographic and network properties. This technique is applied on a novel dataset comprising ∼19 million RTT measurements derived from ∼200 million RTT samples between ∼54 thousand DNS servers. Our main contribution is an information-theoretical analysis that allows us to determine the amount of information that a given subset of geographic or network variables (such as RTT or great circle distance between geolocated hosts) gives about other variables of interest. We then provide bounds on the error that can be expected when using statistical estimators for the variables of interest based on subsets of other variables
Passport: Enabling Accurate Country-Level Router Geolocation using Inaccurate Sources
When does Internet traffic cross international borders? This question has
major geopolitical, legal and social implications and is surprisingly difficult
to answer. A critical stumbling block is a dearth of tools that accurately map
routers traversed by Internet traffic to the countries in which they are
located. This paper presents Passport: a new approach for efficient, accurate
country-level router geolocation and a system that implements it. Passport
provides location predictions with limited active measurements, using machine
learning to combine information from IP geolocation databases, router
hostnames, whois records, and ping measurements. We show that Passport
substantially outperforms existing techniques, and identify cases where paths
traverse countries with implications for security, privacy, and performance
Passport: enabling accurate country-level router geolocation using inaccurate sources
When does Internet traffic cross international borders? This question has major geopolitical, legal and social implications and is surprisingly difficult to answer. A critical stumbling block is a dearth of tools that accurately map routers traversed by Internet traffic to the countries in which they are located. This paper presents Passport: a new approach for efficient, accurate country-level router geolocation and a system that implements it. Passport provides location predictions with limited active measurements, using machine learning to combine information from IP geolocation databases, router hostnames, whois records, and ping measurements. We show that Passport substantially outperforms existing techniques, and identify cases where paths traverse countries with implications for security, privacy, and performance.First author draf
The Use of European Internet Communication Properties for IP Geolocation
IP Geolocation is a term used for finding the geographical location of an IP node. In this paper, we study the Internet communication properties and their use for client-independent Geolocation - finding the location without assistance of the node being located. We present and discuss the communication properties dependence on geographical aspects such as the geographical distance, differences between the source and destination country, and country population density and country ICT development index. For the study, we used a large set of data captured between the nodes geographically distributed across Europe. Based on the results, we propose an algorithm for a final location estimation within the delimited geographical area. The proposed algorithm improves the location accuracy when compared with the current techniques