Passport: enabling accurate country-level router geolocation using inaccurate sources
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First author draft
Date
DOI
Authors
Rehman, Muzammil Abdul
Goldberg, Sharon
Choffnes, David
Version
First author draft
OA Version
Citation
Muzammil Abdul Rehman, Sharon Goldberg, David Choffnes. "Passport: Enabling Accurate Country-Level Router Geolocation using Inaccurate Sources."
Abstract
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.