Retrospective IP Address Geolocation for Geography-Aware Internet Services

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.