The Blind Men and the Internet: Multi-Vantage Point Web Measurements

Jordan Jueckstock, Shaown Sarker, Peter Snyder, Panagiotis Papadopoulos, Matteo Varvello, Benjamin Livshits, Alexandros Kapravelos | Privacy

In this paper, we design and deploy a synchronized multi-vantage point web measurement study to explore the comparability of web measurements across vantage points (VPs). We describe in reproducible detail the system with which we performed synchronized crawls on the Alexa top 5K domains from four distinct network VPs: research university, cloud datacenter, residential network, and Tor gateway proxy. Apart from the expected poor results from Tor, we observed no shocking disparities across VPs, but we did find significant impact from the residential VP’s reliability and performance disadvantages. We also found subtle but distinct indicators that some third-party content consistently avoided crawls from our cloud VP. In summary, we infer that cloud VPs do fail to observe some content of interest to security and privacy researchers, who should consider augmenting cloud VPs with alternate VPs for cross-validation. Our results also imply that the added visibility provided by residential VPs over university VPs is marginal compared to the infrastructure complexity and network fragility they introduce.

View paper

Links

Ready for a better Internet?

Brave’s easy-to-use browser blocks ads by default, making the Web cleaner, faster, and safer for people all over the world.

close

Almost there…

You’re just 60 seconds away from the best privacy online

If your download didn’t start automatically, .

  1. Download Brave

    Click “Save” in the window that pops up, and wait for the download to complete.

    Wait for the download to complete (you may need to click “Save” in a window that pops up).

  2. Run the installer

    Click the downloaded file at the top right of your screen, and follow the instructions to install Brave.

    Click the downloaded file, and follow the instructions to install Brave.

  3. Import settings

    During setup, import bookmarks, extensions, & passwords from your old browser.

Need help?

Get better privacy. Everywhere!

Download Brave mobile for privacy on the go.

Download QR code
Click this file to install Brave Brave logo
Click this file to install Brave Brave logo
Click this file to install Brave Brave logo