Measuring Irregular Geographic Exposure on the Internet

Abstract: We examine the extent of needless traffic exposure by the routing infrastructure to nations geographically irrelevant to packet transmission. We quantify what countries are geographically logical to observe on a network path traveling between two nations through the use of convex hulls circumscribing major population centers. We then compare that to the nation states observed in over 2.5 billion measured paths. We examine both the entire geographic topology of the Internet and a subset of the topology that a Tor user would typically interact with. We find that 44% of paths across the entire geographic topology of the Internet and 33% of paths in the user experience subset unnecessarily expose traffic to one or more nations. Finally, we consider the scenario where countries exercise both legal and physical control over autonomous systems, gaining access to traffic outside of their geographic borders, but carried by organizations that fall under the AS's registered country's legal jurisdiction. At least 49% of paths in both measurements expose traffic to a geographically irrelevant country when considering both the physical and legal countries that a path traverses.