Abstract: With the emergence of strong, national/multinational adversaries to secure communication, the paths that our Internet traffic traverses is increasingly important. In particular, citizens might wish to visit providers only if the routes to and from those providers remains in jurisdictions where their privacy is strongly protected. Because Internet paths are established based on business relationships and other non-geopolitical criteria, we expect that many routes between endpoints will traverse national boundaries. However, users, policymakers and providers currently are in the dark when it comes to where traffic between endpoints flows and the implications for privacy. This project conducts measurements from a vantage point within a given country to a website that is also hosted within that same country, in order to test if the traffic crosses national boundaries. Planetlab nodes will be used as vantage points in the early stages of the project; we will eventually migrate towards user-based testing in order to obtain a more accurate view of the paths traversed by user traffic.
Anthony Faraco-Hadlock (Boston University)
David Choffnes (Northeastern)
Sharon Goldberg (Boston University)