[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.

[Retr0id]

But also, as mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46836803 , someone can still probe the second-last hop and get pretty close.

[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!)

[vitus]

You probably meant to say oversubscribing, not overprovisioning.

Oversubscription is expected to a certain degree (this is fundamentally the same concept as "statistical multiplexing"). But even oversubscription in itself is not guaranteed to result in bufferbloat -- appropriate traffic shaping (especially to "encourage" congestion control algorithms to back off sooner) can mitigate a lot of those issues. And, it can be hard to differentiate between bufferbloat at the last mile vs within the ISP's backbone.

[p1mrx]

Have you seen excessive bufferbloat on a DOCSIS 3.1 modem?

[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.

[danuel]

Hacks