Active Geolocation Project

Zachary Weinberg • Shinyoung Cho
Nicolas Christin • Vyas Sekar • Phillipa Gill

You can find out where a computer is physically, by measuring how long it takes to communicate with other computers in known locations. This is called active geolocation. Nobody is sure how well it works outside of Europe and North America.

This page was part of an experiment that demonstrated active geolocation does work all around the world, at least well enough to determine which country a computer is in. We used this to check the locations of VPN proxy servers operated by a number of commercial services, and we found that many of them are not where the services say they are.

The experiment has concluded for now. If you would like to learn more about our results, you can read our paper, “How to Catch when Proxies Lie,” which was presented at the 2018 Internet Measurement Conference. Also, all of the code we used for the experiment has been published at Github: zackw/active-geolocator.

There may be a follow-up experiment at some point next year. If this happens, it will be announced on my blog, as well as here.