Abstract
The paper deals with the locations of IP addresses that were used in the past. This retrospective geolocation suffers from continuous changes in the Internet space and a limited availability of past IP location databases. I analyse the retrospective geolocation of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses over five years. An approach is also introduced to handle missing past IP geolocation databases. The results show that it is safe to retrospectively locate IP addresses by a couple of years, but there are differences between IPv4 and IPv6. The described parametric model of location lifetime allows us to estimate the time when the address location changed in the past. The retrospective geolocation of IP addresses has a broad range of applications, including social studies, system analyses, and security investigations. Two longitudinal use cases with the applied results are discussed. The first deals with geotargeted online content. The second deals with identity theft prevention in e-commerce.
Highlights
IP geolocation is a fundamental part of many Internet services and applications
The addresses used in the past and their locations were processed from the RIPE Atlas archive [18]
This work has the following conclusions: Late location of IPv4 addresses by three years shows only a minor decrease in accuracy. This is not true for IPv6 addresses, where the late location of only one year shows a significant decrease in accuracy
Summary
IP geolocation is a fundamental part of many Internet services and applications. It delivers the geographical location of any Internet device, independent of its use, installation, software, and hardware. Any of these locations may be needed retrospectively when the reason to locate the device was not known before, or when the locations were obtained but not archived These usages include evaluation of longitudinal studies, observation of long-term location patterns, replication of past system states, study of long-term evolution of the global Internet, and investigation of crime incidents. I work with the historical ground truth that includes past IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and their locations over five years. I work with the location lifetime in a database For this purpose, I evaluate the database-stored location history of one year of about 421 k IPv4 and 47 k IPv6 addresses. The results dealing with retrospective IP address locations (Section 5) are limited to fixed devices.
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