Trust, But Verify, Operator-Reported Geolocation
Katherine Izhikevich, Ben Du, Sumanth Rao, Alisha Ukani, Liz, Izhikevich

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…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAccess Control and Trust · Cryptography and Data Security · Distributed systems and fault tolerance
