POSTER: Why Are You Going That Way? Measuring Unnecessary Exposure of Network Traffic to Nation States

Abstract

In this work, we examine to what extent the Internet's routing infrastructure needlessly exposes network traffic to nations geographically irrelevant to packet transmission. We quantify what countries are geographically logical to see on a network path traveling between two nations through the use of convex hulls circumscribing major population centers, and then compare that to the nation states observed in utilized paths. Our preliminary results show that the majority of paths, 52%, unnecessarily expose traffic to at least one nation. We also explore which nation states are disproportionately allowed to observe and manipulate a larger fraction of Internet traffic than they otherwise should.