+
Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
+web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
+It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
+is hard to find all the details. Many years ago, I wrote a system to
+map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
+network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
+to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users. Back
+then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
+to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
+graph and the map. The output from traceroute typically look like
+this:
+
+
+traceroute to www.stortinget.no (85.88.67.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
+ 1 uio-gw10.uio.no (129.240.202.1) 0.447 ms 0.486 ms 0.621 ms
+ 2 uio-gw8.uio.no (129.240.24.229) 0.467 ms 0.578 ms 0.675 ms
+ 3 oslo-gw1.uninett.no (128.39.65.17) 0.385 ms 0.373 ms 0.358 ms
+ 4 te3-1-2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (193.156.90.3) 1.174 ms 1.172 ms 1.153 ms
+ 5 he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234) 2.627 ms he16-1-1.cr2.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.244.48) 3.172 ms he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234) 2.857 ms
+ 6 ae1.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.39) 0.662 ms 0.637 ms ae0.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.23) 0.622 ms
+ 7 89.191.10.146 (89.191.10.146) 0.931 ms 0.917 ms 0.955 ms
+ 8 * * *
+ 9 * * *
+[...]
+
+
+
This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
+network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
+www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
+package to reach the equipment and return to me. Three packages are
+sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path. This
+is shown for hop 5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
+traceroute request.
+
+
There are many ways to measure trace routes. Other good traceroute
+implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
+both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
+traceroute and a lot of other capabilities). All of them are easily
+available in Debian.
+
+
This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
+different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
+information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe. The
+background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
+from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
+JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content. This will
+leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
+and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
+the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).
+
+
Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
+www.stortinget.no. It is read daily by all members of parliament and
+their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
+citizens of Norway. A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
+ask your browser to contact 8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
+insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
+stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
+www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se. I extracted this by
+asking PhantomJS to visit the
+Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
+render the page (in HAR format using
+their
+netsniff example. I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
+to do this). My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
+addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
+information is spread when visiting the page.
+
+
![map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using GeoIP]()
+
+
When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
+free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
+wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP. KML
+is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
+of the GIS tools I have available. I got good help from by NUUG
+colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
+my
+kmltraceroute git repository. Unfortunately, the quality of the
+free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
+friends had access to) is not up to the task. The IP addresses of
+central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
+controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
+located, as you can see from the
+KML file I created using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
+
+
![scapy traceroute graph for URLs used by www.stortinget.no]()
+
+
I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
+the scrapy project,
+showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
+question.
+The
+graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
+format, and give a good indication on who control the network
+equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation. This graph
+make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
+UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
+3 Communications and NetDNA.
+
+
![example geotraceroute view for www.stortinget.no]()
+
+
In the process, I came across the
+web service GeoTraceroute by
+Salim Gasmi. Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
+various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
+candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
+geolocation. But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
+a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
+for postprocessing. So I contacted the developer and asked if he
+would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
+clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
+machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway. So
+since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
+service thanks to a sensor node set up by
+the NUUG assosiation, and get the
+trace in KML format for further processing.
+
+
![map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using geotraceroute]()
+
+
Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
+Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland. Plenty of places where the
+Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
+without your best interest as their top priority.
+
+
Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
+over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
+ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
+file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
+behind the DNS name is traced this time. To get them all, one would
+have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
+GeoTraceroute). That might be the next step in this project.
+
+
Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
+the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
+And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
+be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
+Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe. (Hm, what should
+we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
+unencrypted over the Internet.
+
+
PS: KML files are drawn using
+the KML viewer from Ivan
+Rublev, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
+Marble. There are heaps of other options too.
+
+
As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.
+
+
