Trust, But Verify, Operator-Reported Geolocation

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the accuracy of operator-reported geolocation in Internet measurement, revealing a small percentage of misreports but highlighting their disproportionate impact and a ten-fold increase over five years.

Contribution

It introduces a bandwidth-efficient methodology for detecting geolocation misreports and provides an open dataset for future research.

Findings

Only 1.5% of RIPE Atlas vantage points misreport geolocation.

Misreports disproportionately affect areas with limited coverage.

The number of misreports has increased ten-fold over five years.

Abstract

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.