6th Lincs Scientific Highlight - LINCS Annual Workshop with its Scientific Committee

“GeoResolver: An Accurate, Scalable, and Explainable Geolocation Technique Using DNS Redirection”, by Hugo Rimlinger (Sorbonne Université)
Obtaining an accurate, explainable, Internet-scale IP geolo- cation dataset has been a longstanding goal of the research community. Despite decades of research on IP geolocation, no current technique can provide such a dataset. In particular, latency-based geolocation techniques do not scale, because, on one hand, we have thousands of available vantage points to perform measurements, but on the other hand, we have no way to select the right ones for each IP address. In this paper, we present GeoResolver, which bridges this gap by using the idea that when multiple operators redirect two prefixes to the same servers, these prefixes should be close to each other. With this intuition, we define a methodology to measure and compare the redirection of prefixes to servers using ECS DNS measurements, and select the prefixes with the smallest redirection distance to a target prefix to issue the latency measurements to targets in that prefix. GeoRe- solver performs nearly as well as a brute force approach using all the vantage points, geolocating 94% of the targets that could actually be geolocated at metro level by using all the vantage points, while using 4.3% of the probing bud- get compared to a state-of-the-art technique. We carefully design GeoResolver to be both accurate and scalable and with our implementation, we start a large-scale geolocation campaign.