A Lightweight Anycast Enumeration and Geolocation

Several Internet services such as CDNs, DNS name servers, and sinkholes use IP-layer anycast to reduce user response times and increase robustness with respect to network failures and denial of service attacks. However, current geolocation tools fail with anycast IP addresses. In our recent work [1], we remedy to this by developing an anycast detection, enumeration, and geolocation technique based on a set of delay measurements from a handful of geographically distributed vantage points. The technique (i) detects if an IP is anycast, (ii) enumerates replicas by finding the maximum set of non-overlapping disks (i.e., areas centered around vantage points), and (iii) geolocates the replicas by solving a classification problem and assigning the server location to the most likely city. We propose to demo this technique. In particular, we visually show how to detect an anycast IP, enumerate its replicas, and geolocate them on a map. The demo allows to browse previously geolocated services, as well as to explore new targets on demand.