research-article

IP geolocation databases: unreliable?

Authors:

Mohamed Ali Kaafar,

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

[1]

B. Gueye, A. Ziviani, M. Crovella, and S. Fdida, Constraint-based geolocation of Internet hosts, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 1219--1232, December 2006.

Digital Library

[2]

V. N. Padmanabhan and L. Subramanian, "An investigation of geographic mapping techniques for Internet hosts," in Proc. ACM SIGCOMM, August 2001.

Digital Library

[3]

E. Katz-Bassett, J. John, A. Krishnamurthy, D. Wetherall, T. Anderson, and Y. Chawathe, "Towards IP geolocation using delay and topology measurements," in Proc. ACM SIGCOMM IMC Conference, October 2006.

Digital Library

[4]

B. Wong, I. Stoyanov, and E. G. Sirer, "Golocalization on the Internet through constraint satisfaction," in Proc. USENIX WORLDS Workshop, November 2005.

Digital Library

[5]

GeoURL, The GeoURL ICBM address server, http://www.geourl.org.

[6]

Net World Map, The net world map project, http://www.networldmap.com.

[7]

Host IP, My IP address lookup and geotargeting community geotarget IP project, http://www.hostip.info.

[8]

IPInfoDB, Free IP address geolocation tools, http://ipinfodb.com/.

[9]

Software 77, Free IP to country database, http://software77.net/geo-ip/.

[10]

Akamai Inc., "Akamai," http://www.akamai.com.

[11]

GeoBytes Inc., 'GeoNetMap - geobytes' IP address to geographic location database, http://www.geobytes.com/GeoNetMap.htm.

[12]

Hexasoft Development Sdn. Bhd, "IP address geolocation to identify website visitor's geographical location," http://www.ip2location.com.

[13]

Quova Inc., GeoPoint - IP geolocation experts, http://www.quova.com.

[14]

MaxMind, "Geolocation and online fraud prevention from MaxMind," http://www.maxmind.com/.

[15]

B. Gueye, S. Uhlig, and S. Fdida, "Investigating the imprecision of IP block-based geolocation," in Proc. PAM Conference, April 2007.

Digital Library

[16]

S. Siwpersad, B. Gueye, and S. Uhlig, "Assessing the geographic resolution of exhaustive tabulation for geolocating Internet hosts," in Proc. PAM Conference, April 2008.

Digital Library

[17]

M. Freedman, M. Vutukurum, N. Feamster, and H. Balakrishnan, Geographic locality of IP prefixes, in Proc. ACM SIGCOMM IMC Conference, October 2005.

Digital Library

[18]

I. Poese, M. A. Kaafar, B. Donnet, B. Gueye, and S. Uhlig, IP geolocation databases: Unreliable? Technische Universität Berlin, Fakultät Elektrotechnik und Informatik, Technical Report 2011-03, February 2011, see http://www.net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de/papers/PKDGU-IGDU-11.pdf.

Cited By

Ma ZHu XLiu FLuo XZhang STai WRen GEr ZXu M(2025)Landmark-v6: A stable IPv6 landmark representation method based on multi-feature clusteringInformation Processing & Management10.1016/j.ipm.2024.10392162:1(103921)Online publication date: Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2024.103921
Liu CCheng RYuan FDing SLiu YLuo X(2025)GDD-Geo: IPv6 geolocation by graph dual decompositionComputer Communications10.1016/j.comcom.2024.108019231(108019)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2024.108019
Homa T(2024)The Future of the Digital Permanent Establishment Concept: Challenges and ObstaclesFinancial Law Review10.4467/22996834FLR.24.009.20614(23-38)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.4467/22996834FLR.24.009.20614
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

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

Recommendations

A look at router geolocation in public and commercial databases
IMC '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference

Internet measurement research frequently needs to map infrastructure components, such as routers, to their physical locations. Although public and commercial geolocation services are often used for this purpose, their accuracy when applied to network ...
IP Geolocation with a Crowd-sourcing Broadband Performance Tool

In this paper, we propose an IP geolocation DB creation method based on a crowd-sourcing Internet broadband performance measurement tagged with locations and present an IP geolocation DB based on 7 years of Internet broadband performance data in Korea. ...
Investigating the imprecision of IP block-based geolocation
PAM'07: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Passive and active network measurement

The lack of adoption of a DNS-based geographic location service as proposed in RFC 1876 has lead to the deployment of alternative ways to locate Internet hosts. The two main alternatives rely either on active probing of individual hosts or on doing ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

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.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 April 2011

Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 41, Issue 2

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

264
Total Citations
View Citations
1,667
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)83
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5

Reflects downloads up to 28 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Ma ZHu XLiu FLuo XZhang STai WRen GEr ZXu M(2025)Landmark-v6: A stable IPv6 landmark representation method based on multi-feature clusteringInformation Processing & Management10.1016/j.ipm.2024.10392162:1(103921)Online publication date: Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2024.103921
Liu CCheng RYuan FDing SLiu YLuo X(2025)GDD-Geo: IPv6 geolocation by graph dual decompositionComputer Communications10.1016/j.comcom.2024.108019231(108019)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2024.108019
Homa T(2024)The Future of the Digital Permanent Establishment Concept: Challenges and ObstaclesFinancial Law Review10.4467/22996834FLR.24.009.20614(23-38)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.4467/22996834FLR.24.009.20614
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
Hong RAgnew WKohno TMorgenstern J(2024)Who's in and who's out? A case study of multimodal CLIP-filtering in DataCompProceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization10.1145/3689904.3694702(1-17)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689904.3694702
Hilal FSattler PVermeulen KGasser O(2024)A First Look At IPv6 Hypergiant InfrastructureProceedings of the ACM on Networking10.1145/36563002:CoNEXT2(1-25)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656300
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
Hiesgen RNawrocki MSchmidt TWählisch M(2024)The Log4j Incident: A Comprehensive Measurement Study of a Critical VulnerabilityIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2024.344018821:6(5921-5934)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TNSM.2024.3440188
Li RYuan XYin MLuo X(2024)Mobile IP Geolocation Based on District Anchor Without Cooperation of Users or Internet Service ProvidersIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2024.347133532:6(5507-5523)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TNET.2024.3471335
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Issue’s Table of Contents