6 ms·

Proof of location for online polls

111 points by c-riq 2y ago

kindofme 2y ago
[dead]
cess11 2y ago
At least they're up-front about the viability of remotely controlled voting farms as an exploit.
jawiggins 2y ago
> Latency-based geolocation can help protect poll integrity by: > Detecting when poll responses originate from outside the intended geographic region > Identifying attempts to manipulate polls through elevated VPN/proxy usage Unless the user also needs to complete a reaction-time test, couldn't this be defeated by using a remote desktop connection to a machine that is physically located in the other geography? It just shifts which functions need to run on the proxy, from network routing to the browser itself.
- polon 2y ago
  I think this is covered on the page "Successfully manipulating a poll which employs this method would require following efforts and resources: Gaining control over a large number of devices in the target geographic region for submitting votes through those devices" So yes, it seems like it can be defeated via a remote desktop (or any proxy in the allowed area)
  - comex 2y ago
    You don’t even need to gain control over a large number of devices in the region. You just need _one_ device in the region, which can connect to the VPN or proxy service you were already using (the assumption seems to be that the attacker has a large number of IPs they can access through such a service). That device will get some added latency from going through the VPN/proxy, but because it’s physically close, the added latency will be small, probably not enough to reliably detect.
    - 85392_school 2y ago
      If you're using a proxy, I don't think whether or not the source device is in the region changes anything. The only variance is in the time from where traffic exits the proxy to servers.
  - banana_giraffe 2y ago
    > Gaining control over a large number of devices in the target geographic region for submitting votes through those devices Does AWS Lambda count as a machine for these purposes? If so, you can get a nearly infinite number of them just by cycling a config param and casting another vote.
    - gavinsyancey 2y ago
      I assume they'd just ban the entire AWS IP block. And similarly for other cloud providers.
  - ghayes 2y ago
    Couldn't the "test" add some variety of math challenge, thus making a simple proxy insufficient. Obviously, this method would add more noise to the final calculation, but if the proxy would need to forward its data to the end-user machine to perform the math, then a simple proxy in this case wouldn't be sufficient.
- TrainedMonkey 2y ago
  Only a small subset of the IPs has proxies on them, so it would be detectable if a disproportionate amount of traffic is coming from them.
- c-riq 2y ago
  That is true, the location proof is only for the hardware whose IP is used for submitting the vote request. However if remote desktop provider / cloud provider / VPN / Tor IPs are already blocked by the voting platform. Then it would require significant effort to acquire hardware in the target geographic region and equip it with a residential IP. Generally the whole setup only makes sense if IP's (or IP ranges) can only vote once per poll. Then large scale manipulations should become impractical.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    You are describing an ideal use case for a botnet of compromised home computers. Should command a much higher premium than sending spam.
  - DeepYogurt 2y ago
    For a motivated attacker its not that hard to add a few thousand raspberry pis to a residential internet network in most countries. Its really a quite practical attack when the stakes are governmental control.
    - myself248 2y ago
      Or just compromise an entire ISP full of routers...
      - j16sdiz 2y ago
        or just sell ISP the routers you made.
  - kvdveer 2y ago
    No need for lots compromised devices. Just a single device (probably doesn't need to be compromised) in IPv4 behind carrier grade NAT is typically enough to vary your IP, or plausibly reuse an IP.
- dheera 2y ago
  Yes, and also, I'd argue that anonymizing your location is a sacred feature of the internet that anytime someone builds a better mousetrap we WILL build a better mouse. The internet is not a place where requiring proof of location is welcome. For online polls, it should never be necessary, either: My rights to vote somewhere should depend only on my membership status to that somewhere, and not my current physical location.
  - Larrikin 2y ago
    This is similar to the argument the failed experiment 4Chan showed the internet. Being fully anonymous, the best arguments don't rise to the top, bad actors lie and lie and when confronted with their lies, they just pretend to be someone else and lie some more. All completely anonymous online polls are effectively useless. It's nice to have some research in helping them be a little less useless.
    - dheera 2y ago
      Anonymity should still be a choice. Especially location anonymity. While I don't mind 7 billion people knowing what I intentionally said publicly, I don't want 7 billion people knowing where I sleep or where I am at this exact moment.
    - frotty 2y ago
      I'd love to see your documentation on where it was ever claimed that 4chan was an experiment in anonymity creating a usable filter for quality? Completely anonymous online polls are impossible, I'm thinking the goal is to have effectively non-publicly identifiable polling with the ability to disallow double voting. Seems absolutely trivial if Every Relevant Citizen was set up with their own API / digi-thumbprint.
      - Larrikin 2y ago
        It was one of the main selling points of 2chan and 4chan 20 years ago. I'm sure Moot is on record somewhere discussing it.
- jagged-chisel 2y ago
  My state lottery app doesn’t let you play outside the state. It detects screen sharing and VPN configuration and refuses to run if it sees these things. Depending on the importance of the poll, one could definitely apply these other requirements.
  - frotty 2y ago
    well yeah, that's against the point of "anonymity" ... you are feeding the app all the data it needs to fence you in. By this logic every government gives a uniquely IDable device to its citizenry for engaging polls. Besides ... if it was "important enough" to break, getting around geofencing etc. is a trivial/already solved part of this.
darig 2y ago
[dead]
anilr 2y ago
Has this been tested, or is it just an idea. I imagine it would have some very serious limitations. Perhaps it could tell if you are likely in the US or Europe, but I doubt could get much more granular than that. Starlink internet customers, and users of Apple's private relay (vpn-like service) would all be excluded?
- c-riq 2y ago
  The goal is to easily get a representative and un-manipulated sample of popular opinion. To achieve that, it might be ok to discriminate against certain users who use connections which cannot prove their location, as long as it's not heavily skewing the results.
- raggi 2y ago
  Tailscale uses latency to pick home DERPs and I am re-evaluating it as we observe what appear to be manipulated STUN latencies for users in Asia particularly in or close to China. The latencies are often raised to over 300ms to affect this, and steer clients toward the US west coast. The reason for these manipulations is unclear, but it's easy to speculate.
  - mulmen 2y ago
    > The reason for these manipulations is unclear, but it's easy to speculate. Care to elaborate? I don’t know why anyone would do this.
    - raggi 2y ago
      This is tin-foil-hat speculation, but for example, if you observe a locality measurement protocol picking where it should connect to, but you already know all of the local sites of interest that are relevant, you might want to find remote sites of interest. If you manipulate the more open sampling protocol to lean toward that remote site, you can then observe where secured connections to which you're otherwise blind, connect to. Now you have new remote targets of interest.
- c-riq 2y ago
skaushik92 2y ago
> Key Advantages: [...] Can provide supportive evidence for VPN/proxy usage, when the latency is too high for all server locations I'm reading through the description, but I'm having trouble understanding the difference between a client having a higher overall latency due to bandwidth/connectivity concerns (e.g. a 3G phone) versus using a VPN. Both would have increased timings and the clock skew would be similar. Would both would be considered too high for proof of location?
- 38 2y ago
  No you read it right. The proposal is idiotic and Will resulted in rural voters being detected as foreign residents
  - croshan 2y ago
    A bit aggressive. No, wouldn't connecting to a slow 3g tower affect ping times to all global servers proportionately? The proposal has other flaws, but phone to tower latency isn't one.
    - vitus 2y ago
      > No, wouldn't connecting to a slow 3g tower affect ping times to all global servers proportionately? Yep. Per the article (last point under "How it works"): > Users with a high latency to all servers can be excluded from polls, as this is a strong indicator of a VPN/proxy usage Something seems off about how they're measuring latency (which seems to be "fetch various AWS Lambda endpoints"), since their system seems to think that I have hundreds of milliseconds of latency even to the nearest AWS region (even though in practice it should be an order of magnitude lower), and multiple seconds to the other side of the world. edit: well, if the slowness is just on last-mile delivery, then it should be a fixed amount of overhead added to each connection (rather than a multiplier). For instance, I have about 8ms of latency added by my ISP just by the first hop into their network. But it's that same 8ms overhead whether I'm connecting to a server on the other side of town, or on the other side of the world.
  - jknoepfler 2y ago
engineer_22 2y ago
When i went to buy a SIM card I had to show ID. Is that the case in all America? Why not offload verification onto telecoms.
- hnav 2y ago
  I think you can still buy prepaid SIMs in the US without ID.
- madars 2y ago
  Fortunately it is not. https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Registration_Policies_Per_Country https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Registration_P...
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  With eSIMs, I think all you need nowadays is a credit card + billing address.
  - gruez 2y ago
    There are vendors that accept crypto as well, so not even billing information is needed.
KaoruAoiShiho 2y ago
Fantastic, solves the issue of bots from foreign adversaries. Everyone complaining doesn't seem to get it, it doesn't need to solve all usecases, but solving this one usecase is great. Conversely, can this be used to show that someone is NOT a chinese/russian bot? I've had enough with people accusing me lol.
- kvdveer 2y ago
  Yesterday I fought off someone/something doing Chinese language crypto-blogspam on my website. Ip-addresses were all unique (mixed ipv4&ipv6), but all were 'located' within 100km of my server in central Europe. If crypto-scammers can bypass geo-restrictions for blogspam, I'm confident that state-level actors can do that even better for geopolitics.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 2y ago
    Did you read the article? It's not about using IP addresses...
    - frotty 2y ago
      right - it's about using latency to the requester. ...which is what fails via 100 methods. I personally can't believe this is omitting addressing the things that would basically ruin this.
dangoodmanUT 2y ago
This space is pretty cool, I worked on a similar logic based on large samples of pings to the ip so you don’t have to worry about clients having to ping out. Obv you are subject to the accuracy of the ip representing their location
mac3n 2y ago
having worked on IP geolocation in the past, I don't think this works. Though it can do a pretty good job of getting you in the right continent. * Not all traffic goes through fiber - there are microwave links operating closer to the speed of light, though these are mostly reserved for high-speed trading. There's also satellite connections, but as long as they don't do satellite-staellite, they're slower. * There are middleboxes messing with traffic, especially TCP, which add delay. * If you rent servers in datacenters, you might not really know where they are. We had VMs relocated without our knowledge. * Fibers links aren't direct, they tend to follow public right-of-ways. In much of the US, that's a rectangular grid along the highway system (look at a road map of the midwest sometime), increasing the delay by √2. * Internet routing isn't shortest-path. It's get-this-crap-off-my-infrastructure, aka hot-potato. * Anycast prefixes have IPs in multiple locations. My experience was that with a lot of observation points, you could get within 10ms, 1000km in most places.
- reocha 2y ago
  I think routing not being shortest path (nor being consistent) is the biggest issue with this method.
- jampekka 2y ago
  > there are microwave links operating closer to the speed of light, though these are mostly reserved for high-speed trading This is so sad.
  - xethos 2y ago
    Sure, but if it becomes ubiquitous, web devs will assume lower latency. That wouldn't make it less sad, just makes different people sad - my first guesses are those at crowded areas with overloaded cellular connections, and Australians.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    It's really not. The microwave links got decommissioned everywhere because nobody NEEDS that higher fraction of lightspeed. High speed trading is the only field where saving a singular millisecond is economically rewarded. The links used by high speed trading are the only ones left.
nickdothutton 2y ago
4chan is going to love this.
- paranoidrobot 2y ago
  This is not a new idea, and I don't believe it will help the malicious actors of the world. People have been doxxed/compromised in the past by opening links or visiting sites from an adversary who used source IP to geolocate someone. I can't see it being more than a verification of existing GeoIP databases and possibly a way to detect some VPN use.
INTPenis 2y ago
Or just adopt eID. I just signed a petition to ensure free and safe abortion in the EU and I could sign with eID from over 20 nations. Get with the program.
kvdveer 2y ago
There are a lot of valid critiques already, but here's another: This technique will have to allow for over-all slow connections. This connection latency could be caused by over-provisioned office connections, torrents, bad gsm reception, cheap internet or a cheap device. What prevents a client from strategically delaying specific requests, to simulate a slow device in the target geography. AFAIT, this would be indistinguishable from the scenarios mentioned above.
- tony-allan 2y ago
  For example very slow ADSL connections or somewhere with poor phone reception.
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  > This technique will have to allow for over-all slow connections I don't think the technique can accommodate that. But I would love to be proven wrong.
  - kvdveer 2y ago
    If only people with fast internet can vote, this is becomes a curious tool for voter suppression.
SteveVeilStream 2y ago
It's an interesting concept. Re: "Cannot be manipulated unlike GPS signal derived coordinates, which can be altered by the user's device before relaying them to the server" Is it possible to ensure that the data is not manipulated? If the user had to install a voting software package on their phone, then couldn't that piece of software take responsibility for pulling the co-ordinates from the device and encrypting it? I am assuming most modern phones are secure enough that the signal from the GPS that is made available to applications can be trusted but maybe I am wrong? Re Starlink: Is it possible to trace your route through a specific satellite and to look up the location of that satellite? That seems like a relatively easy and secure check (aside from the VPN/Proxy concerns which feel like they would be a larger challenge in this scenario since I am assuming the delays through the satellites would be more significant than delays through fiber.)
- c-riq 2y ago
  > Is it possible to ensure that the data is not manipulated? I don't think one can place much trust in phones not being tampered with as they are frequently jailbroken. So you could supply fake GPS antenna data to the software or I believe you could in principle also put your phone in a metal box and spoof actual GPS signals into the box. Civilian GPS signals aren't encrypted, I think..
brian-armstrong 2y ago
Without a good amount of peering, this seems unlikely to work. There is really no guarantee about where traffic will exit a user ISP's network and enter the next. On average, sure, it may take a reasonably short path, but it might also travel halfway across the continent to traverse an IX.
ortusdux 2y ago
Reminds me of the case of the 500-mile email: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
lesostep 2y ago
Usefulness of proposed metrics aside, I can't wrap my head around proposed use cases there. If you don't require proof of identification for voting then one local voter can vote limitless times. If you do require it, why don't you trust it? Surely an identification is enough too choose if someone could vote or not. It could be a nice addition to some social networks like Mastodon, I suppose, if people wouldn't care enough to create puppet accounts just to swing a vote, and false rejections/positives wouldn't mean losing or gaining something meaningful. Other then that, I have no idea.
- c-riq 2y ago
  The idea is to make things like petitions or demonstrations easier on a global scale and to also make voting data accessible for independent analysis, where further manipulation attempts can be identified and excluded. My guess is that it's much cheaper to create 10000 fake accounts on facebook etc than to send 10000 requests from unique residential IPv4 addresses in a target country, which are also evenly distributed across Internet Service Providers and IP blocks to evade detection.
dboreham 2y ago
Proof of location has been researched/studied for a while. There are systems that depend on a mesh of RF connected nodes and associated economic game (which could be replaced by some government authority) to ensure validity. E.g. https://foam.space/about https://foam.space/about
- tomtomistaken 2y ago
  I love what Foam is/was doing. Unfortunately the project looks dead..
ortusdux 2y ago
Are any major fiber routes hollow-core? HFC signals should be ~50% faster than traditional fiber optic cables, and that might be enough to throw off this data.
IgorPartola 2y ago
Have you ever wondered why most studies on humans use college students as test subjects? The answer is that they are easy to survey. Obviously though that can skew results quite a bit because the population is really not all that representative of the general public. This product will do the same thing: it will help narrow the field of candidates to those who are easy to locate. I guess people who do marketing might like this because look high quality online survey results! And the bias is hidden well enough to keep your job! But the reality is that this will affect the results in a meaningful way. For example, my ISP doesn’t support IPv6 so my entire home network is served by IPv6 provided by Hurricane Electric via protocol 41. So depending on what this service does with it I would likely be disqualified since my IPv4 is in a different state than my IPv6. Long story short, cool tech demo and product I would personally avoid using or recommending.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
Isn't this trivially broken? I can't use a VPN, but if I log into a shell at Amsterdam and run the program there (say, Firefox in a remote X Windows context), then all the code they might need will execute there. If any user interaction is needed, this can be pre-scripted.
croemer 2y ago
It would be nice if there was a standalone POC for the geolocation. I only found the vote website. There, one can enable the latency geolocation feature - but it doesn't display any results (it shows latency to various servers but not any analysis thereof).
- c-riq 2y ago
  I just released a demo here https://ip-vote.com/ui/geolocation https://ip-vote.com/ui/geolocation
Jimmc414 2y ago
I'm not seeing in the proposal what is to prevent variable latency - from network congestion, route changes, quality of service differences, ISP peering arrangements, last-mile connection quality variations, and router queue delays - being interpreted as a distance metric?
1970-01-01 2y ago
IPs can easily be spoofed. Until someone hashes all IPs with physical GPS coordinates, this is simply not a proof.
dqrknight 2y ago
How would this solution differentiate a slow connection and a VPN?
remram 2y ago
https://ipv4.games/ https://ipv4.games/ will show you who will win at your polls.
reincoder 2y ago
Well, it is not just "can" be done, but we at IPinfo actively measure the internet and produce IP geolocation data. Sure, there are some limitations with satellite, microwave, and certain WAN-based connections, but it is the best solution for IP geolocation available right now, and we are seriously committed to it. Currently, we operate nearly 900 servers running ping, traceroute, and network measurement activity. Literally yesterday, we hit a milestone of having a server across 300 ASNs. We base our servers across diverse locations and networks. I think at this moment we have very few ASN where we do not have sub 10MS ping times. If you have a question let me know.
Habgdnv 2y ago
More than a decade ago I wanted to revenge my brother (something childish) and at that time he played online games. As packet loss would be too obvious and the games usually require low bandwidth the most viable fun option was to add some latency. You won't see this option in your usual router. tc qdisc add dev eth0 root netem delay 250ms
griomnib 2y ago
An iot botnet + command and control infra cooks this entire idea.
frotty 2y ago
This feels grossly incomplete, and not a barrier to an attack of even remedial sophistication. ie, low latency from any given machine doesn't have any relationship to external controlling connections to the machine. I also don't see anything addressing the "1 external IP for n number of people" being addressed. It's also a bit bizarre to have multiple references to "the speed of light" when this wouldn't work for someone remote desktopping in
- c-riq 2y ago
  To get a hard to manipulate, representative sample of popular opinion it's not necessary to include everyone in the results. Only if the sub-population sharing IP's is large enough and has systematically different opinions than the people who don't share an IP, then this method would skew the results in a certain direction and may not be useful for certain polls in those regions. But it may also be possible to adjust the results, if it is known which IP's are shared and which are not.

111 points by c-riq 2y ago

kindofme 2y ago

[dead]

cess11 2y ago

At least they're up-front about the viability of remotely controlled voting farms as an exploit.

jawiggins 2y ago

> Latency-based geolocation can help protect poll integrity by: > Detecting when poll responses originate from outside the intended geographic region > Identifying attempts to manipulate polls through elevated VPN/proxy usage Unless the user also needs to complete a reaction-time test, couldn't this be defeated by using a remote desktop connection to a machine that is physically located in the other geography? It just shifts which functions need to run on the proxy, from network routing to the browser itself.

polon 2y ago
I think this is covered on the page "Successfully manipulating a poll which employs this method would require following efforts and resources: Gaining control over a large number of devices in the target geographic region for submitting votes through those devices" So yes, it seems like it can be defeated via a remote desktop (or any proxy in the allowed area)
- comex 2y ago
  You don’t even need to gain control over a large number of devices in the region. You just need _one_ device in the region, which can connect to the VPN or proxy service you were already using (the assumption seems to be that the attacker has a large number of IPs they can access through such a service). That device will get some added latency from going through the VPN/proxy, but because it’s physically close, the added latency will be small, probably not enough to reliably detect.
  - 85392_school 2y ago
    If you're using a proxy, I don't think whether or not the source device is in the region changes anything. The only variance is in the time from where traffic exits the proxy to servers.
- banana_giraffe 2y ago
  > Gaining control over a large number of devices in the target geographic region for submitting votes through those devices Does AWS Lambda count as a machine for these purposes? If so, you can get a nearly infinite number of them just by cycling a config param and casting another vote.
  - gavinsyancey 2y ago
    I assume they'd just ban the entire AWS IP block. And similarly for other cloud providers.
- ghayes 2y ago
  Couldn't the "test" add some variety of math challenge, thus making a simple proxy insufficient. Obviously, this method would add more noise to the final calculation, but if the proxy would need to forward its data to the end-user machine to perform the math, then a simple proxy in this case wouldn't be sufficient.
TrainedMonkey 2y ago
Only a small subset of the IPs has proxies on them, so it would be detectable if a disproportionate amount of traffic is coming from them.
c-riq 2y ago
That is true, the location proof is only for the hardware whose IP is used for submitting the vote request. However if remote desktop provider / cloud provider / VPN / Tor IPs are already blocked by the voting platform. Then it would require significant effort to acquire hardware in the target geographic region and equip it with a residential IP. Generally the whole setup only makes sense if IP's (or IP ranges) can only vote once per poll. Then large scale manipulations should become impractical.
- nine_k 2y ago
  You are describing an ideal use case for a botnet of compromised home computers. Should command a much higher premium than sending spam.
- DeepYogurt 2y ago
  For a motivated attacker its not that hard to add a few thousand raspberry pis to a residential internet network in most countries. Its really a quite practical attack when the stakes are governmental control.
  - myself248 2y ago
    Or just compromise an entire ISP full of routers...
    - j16sdiz 2y ago
      or just sell ISP the routers you made.
- kvdveer 2y ago
  No need for lots compromised devices. Just a single device (probably doesn't need to be compromised) in IPv4 behind carrier grade NAT is typically enough to vary your IP, or plausibly reuse an IP.
dheera 2y ago
Yes, and also, I'd argue that anonymizing your location is a sacred feature of the internet that anytime someone builds a better mousetrap we WILL build a better mouse. The internet is not a place where requiring proof of location is welcome. For online polls, it should never be necessary, either: My rights to vote somewhere should depend only on my membership status to that somewhere, and not my current physical location.
- Larrikin 2y ago
  This is similar to the argument the failed experiment 4Chan showed the internet. Being fully anonymous, the best arguments don't rise to the top, bad actors lie and lie and when confronted with their lies, they just pretend to be someone else and lie some more. All completely anonymous online polls are effectively useless. It's nice to have some research in helping them be a little less useless.
  - dheera 2y ago
    Anonymity should still be a choice. Especially location anonymity. While I don't mind 7 billion people knowing what I intentionally said publicly, I don't want 7 billion people knowing where I sleep or where I am at this exact moment.
  - frotty 2y ago
    I'd love to see your documentation on where it was ever claimed that 4chan was an experiment in anonymity creating a usable filter for quality? Completely anonymous online polls are impossible, I'm thinking the goal is to have effectively non-publicly identifiable polling with the ability to disallow double voting. Seems absolutely trivial if Every Relevant Citizen was set up with their own API / digi-thumbprint.
    - Larrikin 2y ago
      It was one of the main selling points of 2chan and 4chan 20 years ago. I'm sure Moot is on record somewhere discussing it.
jagged-chisel 2y ago
My state lottery app doesn’t let you play outside the state. It detects screen sharing and VPN configuration and refuses to run if it sees these things. Depending on the importance of the poll, one could definitely apply these other requirements.
- frotty 2y ago
  well yeah, that's against the point of "anonymity" ... you are feeding the app all the data it needs to fence you in. By this logic every government gives a uniquely IDable device to its citizenry for engaging polls. Besides ... if it was "important enough" to break, getting around geofencing etc. is a trivial/already solved part of this.

darig 2y ago

[dead]

anilr 2y ago

Has this been tested, or is it just an idea. I imagine it would have some very serious limitations. Perhaps it could tell if you are likely in the US or Europe, but I doubt could get much more granular than that. Starlink internet customers, and users of Apple's private relay (vpn-like service) would all be excluded?

c-riq 2y ago
The goal is to easily get a representative and un-manipulated sample of popular opinion. To achieve that, it might be ok to discriminate against certain users who use connections which cannot prove their location, as long as it's not heavily skewing the results.
raggi 2y ago
Tailscale uses latency to pick home DERPs and I am re-evaluating it as we observe what appear to be manipulated STUN latencies for users in Asia particularly in or close to China. The latencies are often raised to over 300ms to affect this, and steer clients toward the US west coast. The reason for these manipulations is unclear, but it's easy to speculate.
- mulmen 2y ago
  > The reason for these manipulations is unclear, but it's easy to speculate. Care to elaborate? I don’t know why anyone would do this.
  - raggi 2y ago
    This is tin-foil-hat speculation, but for example, if you observe a locality measurement protocol picking where it should connect to, but you already know all of the local sites of interest that are relevant, you might want to find remote sites of interest. If you manipulate the more open sampling protocol to lean toward that remote site, you can then observe where secured connections to which you're otherwise blind, connect to. Now you have new remote targets of interest.
c-riq 2y ago

skaushik92 2y ago

> Key Advantages: [...] Can provide supportive evidence for VPN/proxy usage, when the latency is too high for all server locations I'm reading through the description, but I'm having trouble understanding the difference between a client having a higher overall latency due to bandwidth/connectivity concerns (e.g. a 3G phone) versus using a VPN. Both would have increased timings and the clock skew would be similar. Would both would be considered too high for proof of location?

38 2y ago
No you read it right. The proposal is idiotic and Will resulted in rural voters being detected as foreign residents
- croshan 2y ago
  A bit aggressive. No, wouldn't connecting to a slow 3g tower affect ping times to all global servers proportionately? The proposal has other flaws, but phone to tower latency isn't one.
  - vitus 2y ago
    > No, wouldn't connecting to a slow 3g tower affect ping times to all global servers proportionately? Yep. Per the article (last point under "How it works"): > Users with a high latency to all servers can be excluded from polls, as this is a strong indicator of a VPN/proxy usage Something seems off about how they're measuring latency (which seems to be "fetch various AWS Lambda endpoints"), since their system seems to think that I have hundreds of milliseconds of latency even to the nearest AWS region (even though in practice it should be an order of magnitude lower), and multiple seconds to the other side of the world. edit: well, if the slowness is just on last-mile delivery, then it should be a fixed amount of overhead added to each connection (rather than a multiplier). For instance, I have about 8ms of latency added by my ISP just by the first hop into their network. But it's that same 8ms overhead whether I'm connecting to a server on the other side of town, or on the other side of the world.
- jknoepfler 2y ago

engineer_22 2y ago

When i went to buy a SIM card I had to show ID. Is that the case in all America? Why not offload verification onto telecoms.

hnav 2y ago
I think you can still buy prepaid SIMs in the US without ID.
madars 2y ago
Fortunately it is not. https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Registration_Policies_Per_Country https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Registration_P...
lotsofpulp 2y ago
With eSIMs, I think all you need nowadays is a credit card + billing address.
- gruez 2y ago
  There are vendors that accept crypto as well, so not even billing information is needed.

KaoruAoiShiho 2y ago

Fantastic, solves the issue of bots from foreign adversaries. Everyone complaining doesn't seem to get it, it doesn't need to solve all usecases, but solving this one usecase is great. Conversely, can this be used to show that someone is NOT a chinese/russian bot? I've had enough with people accusing me lol.

kvdveer 2y ago
Yesterday I fought off someone/something doing Chinese language crypto-blogspam on my website. Ip-addresses were all unique (mixed ipv4&ipv6), but all were 'located' within 100km of my server in central Europe. If crypto-scammers can bypass geo-restrictions for blogspam, I'm confident that state-level actors can do that even better for geopolitics.
- KaoruAoiShiho 2y ago
  Did you read the article? It's not about using IP addresses...
  - frotty 2y ago
    right - it's about using latency to the requester. ...which is what fails via 100 methods. I personally can't believe this is omitting addressing the things that would basically ruin this.

dangoodmanUT 2y ago

This space is pretty cool, I worked on a similar logic based on large samples of pings to the ip so you don’t have to worry about clients having to ping out. Obv you are subject to the accuracy of the ip representing their location

mac3n 2y ago

having worked on IP geolocation in the past, I don't think this works. Though it can do a pretty good job of getting you in the right continent. * Not all traffic goes through fiber - there are microwave links operating closer to the speed of light, though these are mostly reserved for high-speed trading. There's also satellite connections, but as long as they don't do satellite-staellite, they're slower. * There are middleboxes messing with traffic, especially TCP, which add delay. * If you rent servers in datacenters, you might not really know where they are. We had VMs relocated without our knowledge. * Fibers links aren't direct, they tend to follow public right-of-ways. In much of the US, that's a rectangular grid along the highway system (look at a road map of the midwest sometime), increasing the delay by √2. * Internet routing isn't shortest-path. It's get-this-crap-off-my-infrastructure, aka hot-potato. * Anycast prefixes have IPs in multiple locations. My experience was that with a lot of observation points, you could get within 10ms, 1000km in most places.

reocha 2y ago
I think routing not being shortest path (nor being consistent) is the biggest issue with this method.
jampekka 2y ago
> there are microwave links operating closer to the speed of light, though these are mostly reserved for high-speed trading This is so sad.
- xethos 2y ago
  Sure, but if it becomes ubiquitous, web devs will assume lower latency. That wouldn't make it less sad, just makes different people sad - my first guesses are those at crowded areas with overloaded cellular connections, and Australians.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  It's really not. The microwave links got decommissioned everywhere because nobody NEEDS that higher fraction of lightspeed. High speed trading is the only field where saving a singular millisecond is economically rewarded. The links used by high speed trading are the only ones left.

nickdothutton 2y ago

4chan is going to love this.

paranoidrobot 2y ago
This is not a new idea, and I don't believe it will help the malicious actors of the world. People have been doxxed/compromised in the past by opening links or visiting sites from an adversary who used source IP to geolocate someone. I can't see it being more than a verification of existing GeoIP databases and possibly a way to detect some VPN use.

INTPenis 2y ago

Or just adopt eID. I just signed a petition to ensure free and safe abortion in the EU and I could sign with eID from over 20 nations. Get with the program.

kvdveer 2y ago

There are a lot of valid critiques already, but here's another: This technique will have to allow for over-all slow connections. This connection latency could be caused by over-provisioned office connections, torrents, bad gsm reception, cheap internet or a cheap device. What prevents a client from strategically delaying specific requests, to simulate a slow device in the target geography. AFAIT, this would be indistinguishable from the scenarios mentioned above.

tony-allan 2y ago
For example very slow ADSL connections or somewhere with poor phone reception.
ranger_danger 2y ago
> This technique will have to allow for over-all slow connections I don't think the technique can accommodate that. But I would love to be proven wrong.
- kvdveer 2y ago
  If only people with fast internet can vote, this is becomes a curious tool for voter suppression.

SteveVeilStream 2y ago

It's an interesting concept. Re: "Cannot be manipulated unlike GPS signal derived coordinates, which can be altered by the user's device before relaying them to the server" Is it possible to ensure that the data is not manipulated? If the user had to install a voting software package on their phone, then couldn't that piece of software take responsibility for pulling the co-ordinates from the device and encrypting it? I am assuming most modern phones are secure enough that the signal from the GPS that is made available to applications can be trusted but maybe I am wrong? Re Starlink: Is it possible to trace your route through a specific satellite and to look up the location of that satellite? That seems like a relatively easy and secure check (aside from the VPN/Proxy concerns which feel like they would be a larger challenge in this scenario since I am assuming the delays through the satellites would be more significant than delays through fiber.)

c-riq 2y ago
> Is it possible to ensure that the data is not manipulated? I don't think one can place much trust in phones not being tampered with as they are frequently jailbroken. So you could supply fake GPS antenna data to the software or I believe you could in principle also put your phone in a metal box and spoof actual GPS signals into the box. Civilian GPS signals aren't encrypted, I think..

brian-armstrong 2y ago

Without a good amount of peering, this seems unlikely to work. There is really no guarantee about where traffic will exit a user ISP's network and enter the next. On average, sure, it may take a reasonably short path, but it might also travel halfway across the continent to traverse an IX.

ortusdux 2y ago

Reminds me of the case of the 500-mile email: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

lesostep 2y ago

Usefulness of proposed metrics aside, I can't wrap my head around proposed use cases there. If you don't require proof of identification for voting then one local voter can vote limitless times. If you do require it, why don't you trust it? Surely an identification is enough too choose if someone could vote or not. It could be a nice addition to some social networks like Mastodon, I suppose, if people wouldn't care enough to create puppet accounts just to swing a vote, and false rejections/positives wouldn't mean losing or gaining something meaningful. Other then that, I have no idea.

c-riq 2y ago
The idea is to make things like petitions or demonstrations easier on a global scale and to also make voting data accessible for independent analysis, where further manipulation attempts can be identified and excluded. My guess is that it's much cheaper to create 10000 fake accounts on facebook etc than to send 10000 requests from unique residential IPv4 addresses in a target country, which are also evenly distributed across Internet Service Providers and IP blocks to evade detection.

dboreham 2y ago

Proof of location has been researched/studied for a while. There are systems that depend on a mesh of RF connected nodes and associated economic game (which could be replaced by some government authority) to ensure validity. E.g. https://foam.space/about https://foam.space/about

tomtomistaken 2y ago
I love what Foam is/was doing. Unfortunately the project looks dead..

ortusdux 2y ago

Are any major fiber routes hollow-core? HFC signals should be ~50% faster than traditional fiber optic cables, and that might be enough to throw off this data.

IgorPartola 2y ago

Have you ever wondered why most studies on humans use college students as test subjects? The answer is that they are easy to survey. Obviously though that can skew results quite a bit because the population is really not all that representative of the general public. This product will do the same thing: it will help narrow the field of candidates to those who are easy to locate. I guess people who do marketing might like this because look high quality online survey results! And the bias is hidden well enough to keep your job! But the reality is that this will affect the results in a meaningful way. For example, my ISP doesn’t support IPv6 so my entire home network is served by IPv6 provided by Hurricane Electric via protocol 41. So depending on what this service does with it I would likely be disqualified since my IPv4 is in a different state than my IPv6. Long story short, cool tech demo and product I would personally avoid using or recommending.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago

Isn't this trivially broken? I can't use a VPN, but if I log into a shell at Amsterdam and run the program there (say, Firefox in a remote X Windows context), then all the code they might need will execute there. If any user interaction is needed, this can be pre-scripted.

croemer 2y ago

It would be nice if there was a standalone POC for the geolocation. I only found the vote website. There, one can enable the latency geolocation feature - but it doesn't display any results (it shows latency to various servers but not any analysis thereof).

c-riq 2y ago
I just released a demo here https://ip-vote.com/ui/geolocation https://ip-vote.com/ui/geolocation

Jimmc414 2y ago

I'm not seeing in the proposal what is to prevent variable latency - from network congestion, route changes, quality of service differences, ISP peering arrangements, last-mile connection quality variations, and router queue delays - being interpreted as a distance metric?

1970-01-01 2y ago

IPs can easily be spoofed. Until someone hashes all IPs with physical GPS coordinates, this is simply not a proof.

dqrknight 2y ago

How would this solution differentiate a slow connection and a VPN?

remram 2y ago

https://ipv4.games/ https://ipv4.games/ will show you who will win at your polls.

reincoder 2y ago

Well, it is not just "can" be done, but we at IPinfo actively measure the internet and produce IP geolocation data. Sure, there are some limitations with satellite, microwave, and certain WAN-based connections, but it is the best solution for IP geolocation available right now, and we are seriously committed to it. Currently, we operate nearly 900 servers running ping, traceroute, and network measurement activity. Literally yesterday, we hit a milestone of having a server across 300 ASNs. We base our servers across diverse locations and networks. I think at this moment we have very few ASN where we do not have sub 10MS ping times. If you have a question let me know.

Habgdnv 2y ago

More than a decade ago I wanted to revenge my brother (something childish) and at that time he played online games. As packet loss would be too obvious and the games usually require low bandwidth the most viable fun option was to add some latency. You won't see this option in your usual router. tc qdisc add dev eth0 root netem delay 250ms

griomnib 2y ago

An iot botnet + command and control infra cooks this entire idea.

frotty 2y ago

This feels grossly incomplete, and not a barrier to an attack of even remedial sophistication. ie, low latency from any given machine doesn't have any relationship to external controlling connections to the machine. I also don't see anything addressing the "1 external IP for n number of people" being addressed. It's also a bit bizarre to have multiple references to "the speed of light" when this wouldn't work for someone remote desktopping in

c-riq 2y ago
To get a hard to manipulate, representative sample of popular opinion it's not necessary to include everyone in the results. Only if the sub-population sharing IP's is large enough and has systematically different opinions than the people who don't share an IP, then this method would skew the results in a certain direction and may not be useful for certain polls in those regions. But it may also be possible to adjust the results, if it is known which IP's are shared and which are not.