Abstract
Proxy servers act as an intermediary and a gateway between users and other servers on the Internet, and have many beneficial applications targeting the privacy of users, including bypassing server-side blocking, regional restrictions, etc. Despite the beneficial applications of proxies, they are also used by adversaries to hide their identity and to launch many attacks. As such, many websites restrict access from proxies, resulting in blacklists to filter out those proxies and to aid in their blocking. In this work, we explore the ecosystem of proxies by understanding their affinities and distributions comparatively. We compare residential and open proxies in various ways, including country-level and city-level analyses to highlight their geospatial distributions, similarities, and differences against a large number of blacklists and categories therein, i.e., spam and maliciousness analysis, to understand their characteristics and attributes. We conclude that, while aiming to achieve the same goal, residential and open proxies still have distinct characteristics warranting considering them separately for the role they play in the larger Internet ecosystem. Moreover, we highlight the correlation of proxy locality distribution and five country-level characteristics, such as their Internet censorship, political stability, and Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Highlights
A lot of efforts have been made to improve the privacy of users on the Internet, building an ecosystem around privacy enhancing infrastructure
We provide a correlation analysis of proxies geospatial distribution and five country-level characteristics: Internet content censorship, Internet freedom, political stability, Internet speed, and gross domestic product
Our analysis shows that 6.97% of open proxies, along with 0.27% of residential proxies participated in launching malicious attacks
Summary
A lot of efforts have been made to improve the privacy of users on the Internet, building an ecosystem around privacy enhancing infrastructure. While China is ranked first in the number of open proxies, only one city (Hangzhou) is in the top 10, indicating the high distribution of proxies across the country. To allow users to identify the different intents of proxies, there are multiple online services that make their list of blacklisted proxies public and classify their IP addresses depending on the posed challenge to a destination web-service. Sorbs.net maintains multiple APIs with lists of IPs by their intent, such as open HTTP proxy servers, IPs with spammer abusable vulnerabilities, known spam sources (last 48 hours/28 days/one year/anytime), hijacked, etc. It lists spam supporting service providers with ‘‘third strike and you are out’’ basis. IPs are added within 10 minutes or less of an outbreak; data is collected in real-time and the zone is updated every 10 minutes
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