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Inferring the time-zones of prefixes and autonomous systems by monitoring game server discovery traffic

Published: 01 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Geolocation of IP addresses is used for determining authenticity of webpages, delivering specific country or location related content and advertisements, or to add security for online transactions. Although IP geolocation databases exist, it is sometimes useful to validate their entries or create new, independent databases using independent sources of information. We propose and demonstrate a method whereby collecting and analyzing online game server discovery traffic over short periods of time can allow us to detect in which timezone a certain prefix or AS is located. Our method provides very good estimates of various AS timezones which we verify using publicly available IP geolocation databases.

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J. Hawkinson and T. Bates, "Guidelines for creation, selection, and registration of an Autonomous System (AS)," RFC 1930 (Best Current Practice), Internet Engineering Task Force, Mar. 1996. {Online}. Available: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1930.txt
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G. Armitage, M. Claypool, and P. Branch, Networking and Online Games. John Wiley & Sons, 2006.
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  1. Inferring the time-zones of prefixes and autonomous systems by monitoring game server discovery traffic

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      NOSSDAV '11: Proceedings of the 21st international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video
      June 2011
      138 pages
      ISBN:9781450307772
      DOI:10.1145/1989240
      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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      Published: 01 June 2011

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      Author Tags

      1. autonomous system
      2. first person shooter
      3. gameserver discovery
      4. geolocation
      5. timezone

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