We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency

[jimaek]

This is a little project exploring the feasibility of using a service such as Globalping for geo location needs.

I had fun making it but please note that the current implementation is just a demo and far from a proper production tool.

If you really want to use it then for best possible results you need at least 500 probes per phase.

It could be optimized fairly easily but not without going over the anon user limit which I tried to avoid

[kortex]

I wonder if you could optimize for reducing the total probe count (at the expense of possibly longer total time, though it may be faster in some cases) by using some sort of "gradient descent".

Start by doing the multi-continent probe, say 3x each. Drop the longest time probes, add probes near the shortest time, and probe once. Repeat this pattern of probe, assess, drop and add closer to the target.

You accumulate all data in your orchestrator, so in theory you don't need to deliberately issue multiple probes each round (except for the first) to get statistical power. I would expect this to "chase" the real location continuously instead of 5 discrete phases.

I just watched the Veritasium video on potentials and vector fields - the latency is a scalar potential field of sorts, and you could use it to derive a latency gradient.

[TZubiri]

isn't 3 theoretically enough?

[jurgenaut23]

Congrats on doing it without AI! Just reading your crappy one-word commit messages make me happy.

[networkcat]

Some code may be AI generated, because the code uses "══════" to separate terminal output. In my experience, Claude really likes to use this character to separate terminal output.

[greyface-]

How feasible would it be for the host under measurement to introduce additional artificial latency to ping responses, varying based on source IP, in order to spoof its measured location?

[walletdrainer]

Totally feasible.

You could do even cooler tricks, like https://github.com/blechschmidt/fakeroute

Pointless? Almost certainly.

[Retr0id]

Not-impossible, but it would be a whole lot simpler to just not respond to pings in the first place.

[rnhmjoj]

Traceroutes are already notoriously hard to interpret correctly[1] and yes, they can be trivially spoofed. Remember the stunt[2] pulled by tpb to move to North Korea? If you are an AS you can also prepend fake AS to your BGP announcements and make the spoofed traceroute even more legitimate.

I wonder if this thing will start a cat and mouse game with VPNs.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/1hkm4g/lets_tal...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5319419

[altairprime]

Courtesy of Xfinity and Charter overprovisioning most neighborhood’s circuits, we already have that today for a significant subset of U.S. Internet users due to the resulting Bufferbloat (up to 2500ms on a 1000/30 connection!)

[TZubiri]

>varying based on source IP,

Aha, that's what you would think, but what if I fake the source of the IP used to do the geolocation ping instead!

[maccard]

Totally feasible but a bit like all these situations - it’s not happening in practice.

[Havoc]

Bit surprised this works. Latency variability is huge and sometimes quite disconnected from geo location. I recall talking to someone in NL and realised I've got better latency to NL content from the UK than he did. Presumably better peering etc.

[reincoder]

I work for IPinfo. We are launching a collaborative project with IXPs and major internet organizations to share raw measurement for routing and peering data for this purpose.

Latency variability is a huge issue. We run both traceroute and ping data, and we observe that there are entire countries that peer with IXP thousands of miles away in a different continent.

We bought a server from the oldest telecom company in the country and recently activated it. Currently, there is a 20 ms latency when traffic is directed towards the second oldest telecom. The packets have to travel outside the country before coming back in. This is a common phenomenon that occurs frequently. So, we usually have multiple servers in major cities since various ASNs have different peering policies.

For us we can map those behaviors and have algorithms and other data sources, make measurement-based geolocation perform well.

We are hoping to support IXPs, internet governance agencies, and major telcoms in identifying these issues and resolving them.

[matt-p]

Could just be local loop latency, in VDSL or DOCSIS you can get 5-15ms of latency just in your first 1KM. London (e.g Telehouse) > Amsterdam is only about 7ms.

[vasco]

Wouldn't you just be closer to the closest PoP and requesting mostly cached content? With how connected amsterdam is they couldn't be around there. Also depending on when it was up until like 7-8 years ago even in major city centers there was no fiber in most places in NL. Now it's mostly covered.

[TacticalCoder]

> Latency variability is huge ...

Yup. For example from my city to one of my dedicated server whose location is fully well-know (in France), I know there's 250 kilometers as the crow flies. Yet if I ping that server and draw a circle around my place (considering ping travels as fast as light in a vaccuum, which we know ain't happening but, hey, it's something) I get a radius of 2000 kilometers. About 8x the distance. I can prove that my IP ain't in the US but that's still not very precise.

And indeed many servers in the UK, which is 2x the distance than my server is, gives me constantly a lower ping.

TFA's approach, especially with the traceroute instead of Ping, is nice.

[lopoc]

Nice work! I presented similar research at DEFCON 31 - 'You Can't Cheat Time: Finding foes and yourself with latency trilateration' https://youtu.be/_iAffzWxexA

though with some key differences that address the limitations mentioned in the thread. The main issue with pure ping-based geolocation is that: IPs are already geolocated in databases (as you note) Routing asymmetries break the distance model Anycast/CDNs make single IPs appear in multiple locations ICMP can be blocked or deprioritized My approach used HTTP(S) latency measurements (not ping) with an ML model (SVR) trained on ~39k datapoints to handle internet routing non-linearity, then performed trilateration via optimization. Accuracy was ~600km for targets behind CloudFront - not precise, but enough to narrow attribution from "anywhere" to "probably Europe" for C2 servers. The real value isn't precision but rather: Detecting sandboxes via physically impossible latency patterns Enabling geo-fenced malware Providing any location signal when traditional IP geolocation fails Talk: https://youtu.be/_iAffzWxexA"

[rixed]

FYI, speed of light in fiber is much less than 300Mm/s.

  a simple rule of thumb is that a signal using optical fiber for communication will travel at around 200,000 kilometers per second

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_fiber

[tylervigen]

I suppose if your goal was to not be found, you could "cheat time" by implementing a random delay on all outgoing packets. The second iteration of this would be to spoof latency based on where you want to appear to be, by creating rules for intentional latency based on the source of the ping.

[reincoder]

Thank you, Dimitry. Everyone at IPinfo really appreciates the shoutout!

---

Our research scientist, Calvin, will be giving a talk at NANOG96 on Monday that delves into active measurement-based IP geolocation.

https://nanog.org/events/nanog-96/content/5678/

[westurner]

Wi-FI RTT is more accurate than trilateration with RSSI but requires hw support.

IEEE 802.11mc > Wi-Fi Round Trip Time (RTT) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11mc#Wi-Fi_Round_Trip...

/? fine time measurement FTM: https://www.google.com/search?q=fine+time+measurement+FTM

[lpapez]

Amazing idea and execution, the sort of stuff I wish there was more of on HN.

[VladVladikoff]

If I understood the post the author just takes the location of smallest ping as the winner. This seems like a very rudimentary approach. Why not do triangulation? If you take each ping time as a measurement of distance between two points, you should be able to ping from a random selection of IPs and from there calculate the location.

[jimaek]

I talk a little about it in the article, but the main goal was to build something simple that works as proof of concept.

This brute force approach works much better than I expected as long as you have enough probes and a bit of luck.

But of course there are much better and smarter approaches to this, no doubt!

[direwolf20]

Packets don't travel in straight lines.

[29athrowaway]

If you like this topic, read "The Cuckoo's Egg" (1989) by Clifford Stoll

[xyst]

Tried with an IP allocated to a major wireless network operator. It was far off but also ran out of credits when trying with higher limits on subsequent attempts.

Seems tool is relying on ICMP results from various probes. So wouldn't this project become useless if target device disables ICMP?

I wonder if you can "fake" results by having your gateway/device respond with fake ICMP requests.

[jimaek]

I talk about it a bit in the article. The easiest solution is to use the last available hop. In most cases its close enough to properly detect the country even if the target blocks ICMP.

Email me if you would like to get some additional credits to test it out, dakulovgr gmail.

[tallytarik]

Great post and a great little tool. Some of my experience using these techniques in production:

1. Trilateration mostly doesn't work with internet routing, unlike GPS. Other commenters have covered this in more detail. So the approach described here - to take the closest single measurement - is often the best you can do without prior data. This means you need a crazy high distribution of nodes across cities to get useful data at scale. We run our own servers and also sponsor Globalping and use RIPE Atlas for some measurements (I work for a geo data provider), yet even with thousands of available probes, we can only accurately infer latency-based location for IPs very close to those probes.

2. As such, latency/traceroute measurements are most useful for verifying existing location data. That means for the vast majority of IP space, we rely on having something to compare against.

3. Traceroute hops are good; the caveat being that you're geolocating a router. RIPE IPmap already locates most public routers with good precision.

4. Overall these techniques work quite well for infrastructure and server IP addresses but less so for eyeball networks.

https://ping.sx is also a nice comparison tool

[lopoc]

agree but...

https://youtu.be/_iAffzWxexA

20 minutes talk at DEFCON

[navigate8310]

> Globalping is an open-source, community-powered project that allows users to self-host container-based probes. These probes then become part of our public network, which allows anyone to use them to run network testing tools such as ping and traceroute.

How's this different from RIPE ATLAS?

[jimaek]

Atlas is great but it is focused more on academic research and professional use.

Globalping offers real-time result streaming and a simpler user experience with focus on integrations https://globalping.io/integrations

For example you can use the CLI as if you were running a traceroute locally, without even having to register.

And if you need more credits you can simply donate via GitHub Sponsors starting from $1

They are similar with an overlapping audience yet have different goals

[jacquesm]

It'd be clever to integrate this into the TCP stack so it tells you immediately what the lowest bound is on the distance to the counterparty based on the time between data sent and the corresponding acknowledgements. I can see some immediate applications for that.

[toast0]

You can get tcp measured round trip time from tcp_info with

   struct tcp_info info;
   socklen_t len = sizeof(info);
   getsockopt(sock, IPPROTO_TCP, TCP_INFO, &info, &len);

tcp_info varies by OS and version, but I think tcpi_rtt is well supported.

[tgtweak]

You can extend this by looking at the IP route for the reverse path, I've found it's usually accurate to the state at least on the last hop before destination - added benefit that there's usually an airport or city code on the fqdn of that hop.

[navigate8310]

> Group and sort the results; the country with the lowest latency should be the correct one

Sometimes residential ISPs (that hosts the probe) may have a bad routing due to many factors, how does the algorithm take that into account?

[direwolf20]

You have a lot of probes so you also have one with good routing

[nickorlow]

Wonder if you can do this with mobile phones by timing the time to the first ring?

[DenisDolya]

Wow, it works !