Trust, But Verify, Operator-Reported Geolocation
<|reference_start|>Trust, But Verify, Operator-Reported Geolocation: Geolocation plays a critical role in understanding the Internet. In this work, we provide an in-depth analysis of operator-misreported geolocation. Using a bandwidth-efficient methodology, we find in May 2024 that only a small percentage (1.5%) of vantage points in the largest community-vantage point collection, RIPE Atlas, do not respond from their operator-reported geolocation. However, misreported geolocations disproportionately affect areas with limited coverage and cause entire countries to be left with no vantage points. Furthermore, the problem is escalating: within the past five years, the number of probes reporting the wrong location has increased ten-fold. To increase the accuracy of future methodologies and studies that rely upon operator-reported geolocation, we open source our methodology and release a continually updated dataset of RIPE Atlas vantage points that misreport geolocation.<|reference_end|>
@article{izhikevich2024trust,,
    title={Trust, But Verify, Operator-Reported Geolocation},
    author={Katherine Izhikevich, Ben Du, Sumanth Rao, Alisha Ukani, Liz
  Izhikevich},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.19109},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2409.19109},
    primaryClass={cs.NI}
}