IP Geolocation through Reverse DNS
This addresses the need for more accurate and publicly accessible geolocation tools for online services, though it is incremental as it builds on existing data sources.
The paper tackles the problem of inaccurate IP geolocation by proposing a method that uses reverse DNS hostnames to map IP addresses to locations, showing it significantly outperforms academic baselines and is competitive with commercial databases.
IP Geolocation databases are widely used in online services to map end user IP addresses to their geographical locations. However, they use proprietary geolocation methods and in some cases they have poor accuracy. We propose a systematic approach to use publicly accessible reverse DNS hostnames for geolocating IP addresses. Our method is designed to be combined with other geolocation data sources. We cast the task as a machine learning problem where for a given hostname, we generate and rank a list of potential location candidates. We evaluate our approach against three state of the art academic baselines and two state of the art commercial IP geolocation databases. We show that our work significantly outperforms the academic baselines, and is complementary and competitive with commercial databases. To aid reproducibility, we open source our entire approach.