Re: [Geowanking] IP geolocation

[Mike Liebhold]

Most of the big commercial IP geolocation providers, like quova also have robust  and improving capablities to mine ip geolocations for addresses that might be behind a proxy.  I know from personal experience from behind a proxy a thousand miles away from my registered address, when I used the findme ip geolocation utility on a high profile web mapping site. The International Herald Tribune has an astounding and chilling quote here from Madam Hu Qiheng, chair of the Internet Society of China, regarding China's impending wide scale adoption of IPv6,  and  plans for more traceable individual IP adresses: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/19/business/chinet20.php "  The standard, known as IPv6, solves technical problems faced by the Internet around the world, but Internet freedom advocates outside China warn that the internationally developed norm would also allow Beijing authorities - or any government or company for that matter - to have a better idea of what individuals are doing on the Internet.   "There is now anonymity for criminals on the Internet in China," said Hu Qiheng, chair of the Internet Society of China, a public-private group founded five years ago to promote the Internet in China. "With the China Next Generation Internet project, we will give everyone a unique identity on the Internet." [snip] "It may not be popular everywhere to say this, but I think it is important for the government to monitor and police the Internet," Hu said. "Bad things now happen on the Internet, and we want to stop that."   Fighting Internet crime, which Hu defined broadly to include acts counter to the interests of the Chinese government, requires a more certain way of identifying people online, she said.   The IPv6 standard, Hu said, offered the best mechanism for establishing the identity of users online. "   James Muir wrote: those on the list with an interest in geolocating internet users and/or devices may be interested in the following: %%%%%%%% title:  Internet Geolocation and Evasion http://www.ccsl.carleton.ca/~jamuir/papers/TR-06-05.pdf http://www.scs.carleton.ca/research/tech_reports/2006/ abstract: Internet geolocation technology (IP geolocation) aims to determine the physical (geographic) location of Internet users and devices. It is currently proposed or in use for a wide variety of purposes, including targeted marketing, restricting digital content sales to authorized jurisdictions, and security applications such as reducing credit card fraud. This raises questions about the veracity of claims of accurate and reliable geolocation, and the ability to evade geolocation. We begin with a state-of-the-art survey of IP geolocation techniques and limitations, and examine the specific problems of (1) approximating a physical location from an IP address; and (2) approximating the physical location of an end client requesting content from a web server. In contrast to previous work, we consider also an adversarial model: a knowledgeable adversary seeking to evade geolocation. Our survey serves as the basis from which we examine tactics useful for evasion/circumvention. The adversarial model leads us to also consider the difficulty of (3) extracting the IP address of an end client visiting a server. As a side-result, in exploring the use of proxy servers as an evasionary tactic, to our surprise we found that we were able to extract an end-client IP address even for a browser protected by Tor/Privoxy (designed to anonymize browsing), provided Java is enabled. We expect our work to stimulate further open research and analysis of techniques for accurate and reliable IP geolocation, and also for evasion thereof. Our work is a small step towards a better understanding of what can, and cannot, be reliably hidden or discovered about IP addresses and physical locations of Internet users and machines. %%%%%%%%% any comments are welcome. -James _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list Geowanking@lists.burri.to http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking

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