Comment by observationist

Comment by observationist 14 hours ago

In principle, if you ping from multiple known interfaces and paths, you can infer probable location, with confidence going up with the more known points of reference you have. You can do a little calculation and triangulation based off of latency and responsive known targets traversing the same path as the endpoint you're trying to geolocate, and get a very high confidence result for zip code, city, or maybe even 3-4 block radius, if there are a bunch of ISPs in the region. Even with only 3-4 ISPs, by sourcing from different directions along different networks you can get more resolution in the final estimated radius for geolocation.

You can even use a whole bunch of fuzzy rough estimations for endpoints in a region to get progressive increments in resolution until you're happy with a precise location. You can also use educated guesses about the type of router at each hop, then use response times and behaviors for pings coming from different directions at different times. If you can arrange to traverse a node and pump traffic over it, you can use behavior with different types of traffic to elicit the type of router, the policies in place, and so on.

It's a good idea to turn off responses to pings and minimize the amount of information available, even if it seems mostly harmless. The amount of information you can get from the public internet, just in terms of basic network utility functions and behaviors, is probably a lot more than most people ever consider.

Lalo-ATX 9 hours ago

Traceroute isn’t “ping,” it’s exploiting TTL manipulation to generate ICMP unreachables.

You could do the long list of things you listed. Has anyone done a high-quality implementation of those things? And checked the results? I’d be interested in seeing that.

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toast0 9 hours ago

That only really works if ISP routing is drastically different than it usually is. When I was on DSL at my current house, the IP range available covers basically the whole multi-county metro area; all paths go through the PPPoE concentrator in a single location. You could maybe make a distance estimate from the concentrator, but there's no way to get more information than that.

I think the cable company is a bit more refined, I see cities in traceroutes that don't make sense for the whole metro area to route through, so it's likely that you can determine county, and possibly more specific. But you won't get any useful information from trying to ping outside resources; ISP networks all interconnect at the local internet exchange (or there about), when I had access to a DSL, a cable, and a local fiber ISP all in the same city, pings all went back to the IX. Maybe if you have a lot of presence in an ISP, you can gather a bit more data about users in that ISP, but it won't help you gather data about users on other ISPs.

Disabling pings is nice and all, but if you exchange any traffic, round trip times are pretty easy to gather from that. Delayed ack ads a bit of a challenge, but not much.

Of course, many isps offer geofeeds for their IPs. That's pretty reasonable to use if offered.

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