Tried with Tor. Not even close.
Passive TCP/IP Geo-Location
41–50 of 91 posts
Re: Passive TCP/IP Geo-Location
#42I did this a few years ago, a simple tool that pinged places all over the world and calculated where you should be. This only ever gets as close as your ISP, or perhaps a local routing center if your ISP has multiple (mine has only one in Amsterdam, I live on the other side of the country). This means it's less accurate than your typical GeoIP database. Edit: I'm no longer sure this is the same. The title mentions "p…
I'm thinking this might become pretty important with IPv6, no? My ISP advertises a prefix I can do SLAAC with, but they won't allow you to assign an arbitrary address outside that prefix (which seems reasonable-ish for routing). GeoIP databases will have a harder time with IPv6, but if ISPs only use prefixes like this then it'll still be manageable..
Re: Passive TCP/IP Geo-Location
#43Re: Passive TCP/IP Geo-Location
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The common area of all circles show your likely location.
OK... I get that. But, where am I? http://tinypic.com/r/2ushgus/9
Western Europe I think?
It's confusing, some of the circles are shaded inside and some outside. I think the idea is if the ping is high it covers the whole globe except a circle around the antipodes (shaded outside), and if the ping is low it only covers around the server (shaded inside).
Re: Passive TCP/IP Geo-Location
#45Don't forget that this is a proof-of-concept and is not meant to be an reliable solution for you to replace GeoIP with, but rather a concept to play with thoughts.
The first thing that comes to mind would be combining this with peer-to-peer pinging - which if the swarm is big enough could potentially provide a fairly decent geolocation mechanism.
Re: Passive TCP/IP Geo-Location
#46Little Snitch[1] does a very good job of preventing this sort of attack. Even if they give names to the servers that make me think they're something I want to allow, the time I spend clicking the "Allow" button is well outside the margin of error of the latency measurements. I'm in NYC and the tool places me in Frankfort, Germany.
+1 for Little Snitch.
Re: Passive TCP/IP Geo-Location
#47Delay component of the round trip time contains sum of:
1. delays in buffer queue
2. serialization delays
3. processing delays
4. propagation delays
While propagation delay usually makes up the largest portion, it is not always the case. Furthermore, the routing efficiency varies widely, depending on IX peering and INET upstream arrangements of your ISP. It also helps to know the topology of the underlying physical networks, or at least major POPs.
This is like measuring intensity of the Sun with the naked eye.
Re: Passive TCP/IP Geo-Location
#48This is wildly inaccurate. I'm in the U.S. (not even a southern state) and it thinks I'm somewhere well off the coast of Peru. Perhaps my results are atypical, or there's a rendering problem? Perhaps this could be improved with more servers and a better algorithm for resolving the times?
Re: Passive TCP/IP Geo-Location
#49This is wildly inaccurate. I'm in the U.S. (not even a southern state) and it thinks I'm somewhere well off the coast of Peru. Perhaps my results are atypical, or there's a rendering problem? Perhaps this could be improved with more servers and a better algorithm for resolving the times?
Actually, what it's trying to tell you is that you're not in Peru. If you're 220 ms away from Singapore, you must not be in Columbia, since a speed-of-light transmission would take longer than that to make a round trip.
For me, the most specific fix is provided by New York and San Francisco. Together, they can tell that I'm somewhere in the US, Canada, or Mexico. (But, of course, you could have figured that out from GeoIP.)
Re: Passive TCP/IP Geo-Location
#50I see the bug. If the ping times are high enough (~250ms) it will happily create circles which exceed the area of earth, and the google maps API will happily draw negative circles which exclude the user's likely location.
Really there should be a max function that shades the entire earth (or ignores it since that result really can't tell you anything).