research-article

IP geolocation databases: unreliable?

Authors:

Mohamed Ali Kaafar,

Benoit Donnet, and

Bamba GueyeAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Volume 41, Issue 2

Pages 53 - 56

https://doi.org/10.1145/1971162.1971171

Published: 15 April 2011 Publication History

Abstract

The most widely used technique for IP geolocation consists in building a database to keep the mapping between IP blocks and a geographic location. Several databases are available and are frequently used by many services and web sites in the Internet. Contrary to widespread belief, geolocation databases are far from being as reliable as they claim. In this paper, we conduct a comparison of several current geolocation databases -both commercial and free- to have an insight of the limitations in their usability.

First, the vast majority of entries in the databases refer only to a few popular countries (e.g., U.S.). This creates an imbalance in the representation of countries across the IP blocks of the databases. Second, these entries do not reflect the original allocation of IP blocks, nor BGP announcements. In addition, we quantify the accuracy of geolocation databases on a large European ISP based on ground truth information. This is the first study using a ground truth showing that the overly fine granularity of database entries makes their accuracy worse, not better. Geolocation databases can claim country-level accuracy, but certainly not city-level.

References

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Cited By

Cho SWeinberg ZBhattacharya ADai SRauf R(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
https://doi.org/10.23919/TMA62044.2024.10559002
Reed NBull SShrestha USarche MKaufman C(2024)Combating Fraudulent Participation in Urban American Indian and Alaska Native Virtual Health Research: Protocol for Increasing Data Integrity in Online Research (PRIOR)JMIR Research Protocols10.2196/5228113(e52281)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.2196/52281
Shi RCheng RHan BCheng YChen S(2024)A Closer Look into IPFS: Accessibility, Content, and PerformanceProceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems10.1145/36560158:2(1-31)Online publication date: 29-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656015
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Index Terms

IP geolocation databases: unreliable?
1. Networks
  1. Network properties
    1. Network structure

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 41, Issue 2

April 2011

60 pages

ISSN:0146-4833

DOI:10.1145/1971162

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2011 Authors.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 April 2011

Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 41, Issue 2

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Cho SWeinberg ZBhattacharya ADai SRauf R(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
https://doi.org/10.23919/TMA62044.2024.10559002
Reed NBull SShrestha USarche MKaufman C(2024)Combating Fraudulent Participation in Urban American Indian and Alaska Native Virtual Health Research: Protocol for Increasing Data Integrity in Online Research (PRIOR)JMIR Research Protocols10.2196/5228113(e52281)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2024
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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656015
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