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A look at router geolocation in public and commercial databases

Published: 01 November 2017 Publication History

Abstract

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 infrastructure has not been sufficiently assessed. Prior work focused on evaluating the overall accuracy of geolocation databases, which is dominated by their performance on end-user IP addresses. In this work, we evaluate the reliability of router geolocation in databases. We use a dataset of about 1.64M router interface IP addresses extracted from the CAIDA Ark dataset to examine the country- and city-level coverage and consistency of popular public and commercial geolocation databases. We also create and provide a ground-truth dataset of 16,586 router interface IP addresses and their city-level locations, and use it to evaluate the databases' accuracy with a regional breakdown analysis. Our results show that the databases are not reliable for geolocating routers and that there is room to improve their country- and city-level accuracy. Based on our results, we present a set of recommendations to researchers concerning the use of geolocation databases to geolocate routers.

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  1. A look at router geolocation in public and commercial databases

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      IMC '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference
      November 2017
      509 pages
      ISBN:9781450351188
      DOI:10.1145/3131365
      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 the author(s) 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 November 2017

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      Author Tags

      1. IP geolocation
      2. geolocation databases
      3. router geolocation

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      • DHS S&T/CSD
      • BAA 11-01-RIKA and Air Force Research Laboratory, Information Directorate

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      IMC '17
      IMC '17: Internet Measurement Conference
      November 1 - 3, 2017
      London, United Kingdom

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      • (2024)CalcuLatencyProceedings of the 33rd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3698900.3699027(2263-2280)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2024
      • (2024)A Method for Quantifying Global Network Topology Based on a Mathematical ModelMathematics10.3390/math1219311412:19(3114)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2024
      • (2024)Selection of Landmarks for Efficient Active Geolocation2024 8th Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA)10.23919/TMA62044.2024.10559002(1-9)Online publication date: 21-May-2024
      • (2024)Poster: GeoResolver, An Accurate, Scalable, and Explainable Geolocation Technique Using DNS RedirectionProceedings of the 20th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies10.1145/3680121.3699884(21-22)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2024
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      • (2024)GraphCyber: Identifying IP Usage Scenarios for Cyberspace MappingICC 2024 - IEEE International Conference on Communications10.1109/ICC51166.2024.10622350(3310-3315)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2024
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