c-riq (u/c-riq) - Readit News

c-riq commented on Proof of location for online polls ip-vote.com/geolocation_v... · Posted by u/c-riq

croemer · a year ago

It would be nice if there was a standalone POC for the geolocation. I only found the vote website. There, one can enable the latency geolocation feature - but it doesn't display any results (it shows latency to various servers but not any analysis thereof).

c-riq · a year ago

I just released a demo here https://ip-vote.com/ui/geolocation

c-riq commented on Proof of location for online polls ip-vote.com/geolocation_v... · Posted by u/c-riq

skaushik92 · a year ago

> Key Advantages: [...] Can provide supportive evidence for VPN/proxy usage, when the latency is too high for all server locations

I'm reading through the description, but I'm having trouble understanding the difference between a client having a higher overall latency due to bandwidth/connectivity concerns (e.g. a 3G phone) versus using a VPN. Both would have increased timings and the clock skew would be similar. Would both would be considered too high for proof of location?

c-riq · a year ago

For slow connections you can still make use Geo IP data (such as maxmind.com) to infer location, which should be quite reliable in most cases. You just cannot meet the stricter hardware location proof criteria based on latency. You may still submit a poll answer but it may not be included in the analyses, which require a higher degree of confidence for the location. For the objective of obtaining a hard-to-manipulate sample of popular opinion, this would only be an issue if people with slow connections give systematically different responses for a given poll. But this should then also become apparent when analysing the data and can be considered for any decisions derived from the poll.

c-riq commented on Proof of location for online polls ip-vote.com/geolocation_v... · Posted by u/c-riq

frotty · a year ago

This feels grossly incomplete, and not a barrier to an attack of even remedial sophistication. ie, low latency from any given machine doesn't have any relationship to external controlling connections to the machine.

I also don't see anything addressing the "1 external IP for n number of people" being addressed.

It's also a bit bizarre to have multiple references to "the speed of light" when this wouldn't work for someone remote desktopping in

c-riq · a year ago

To get a hard to manipulate, representative sample of popular opinion it's not necessary to include everyone in the results. Only if the sub-population sharing IP's is large enough and has systematically different opinions than the people who don't share an IP, then this method would skew the results in a certain direction and may not be useful for certain polls in those regions. But it may also be possible to adjust the results, if it is known which IP's are shared and which are not.

c-riq commented on Proof of location for online polls ip-vote.com/geolocation_v... · Posted by u/c-riq

lesostep · a year ago

Usefulness of proposed metrics aside, I can't wrap my head around proposed use cases there.

If you don't require proof of identification for voting then one local voter can vote limitless times. If you do require it, why don't you trust it? Surely an identification is enough too choose if someone could vote or not.

It could be a nice addition to some social networks like Mastodon, I suppose, if people wouldn't care enough to create puppet accounts just to swing a vote, and false rejections/positives wouldn't mean losing or gaining something meaningful. Other then that, I have no idea.

c-riq · a year ago

The idea is to make things like petitions or demonstrations easier on a global scale and to also make voting data accessible for independent analysis, where further manipulation attempts can be identified and excluded. My guess is that it's much cheaper to create 10000 fake accounts on facebook etc than to send 10000 requests from unique residential IPv4 addresses in a target country, which are also evenly distributed across Internet Service Providers and IP blocks to evade detection.

c-riq commented on Proof of location for online polls ip-vote.com/geolocation_v... · Posted by u/c-riq

SteveVeilStream · a year ago

It's an interesting concept.

Re: "Cannot be manipulated unlike GPS signal derived coordinates, which can be altered by the user's device before relaying them to the server"

Is it possible to ensure that the data is not manipulated? If the user had to install a voting software package on their phone, then couldn't that piece of software take responsibility for pulling the co-ordinates from the device and encrypting it? I am assuming most modern phones are secure enough that the signal from the GPS that is made available to applications can be trusted but maybe I am wrong?

Re Starlink: Is it possible to trace your route through a specific satellite and to look up the location of that satellite? That seems like a relatively easy and secure check (aside from the VPN/Proxy concerns which feel like they would be a larger challenge in this scenario since I am assuming the delays through the satellites would be more significant than delays through fiber.)

c-riq · a year ago

> Is it possible to ensure that the data is not manipulated? I don't think one can place much trust in phones not being tampered with as they are frequently jailbroken. So you could supply fake GPS antenna data to the software or I believe you could in principle also put your phone in a metal box and spoof actual GPS signals into the box. Civilian GPS signals aren't encrypted, I think..

c-riq commented on Proof of location for online polls ip-vote.com/geolocation_v... · Posted by u/c-riq

matthewdgreen · a year ago

Why is clock skew being used here at all? I'm confused why the client's clock is being trusted or consulted in any way for a measurement like this. I should probably click through and read the details.

ETA Ok, reading the code turned up not a lot of comments. But it did produce the following line. I hope that's for testing and not the actual nonce generation process:

nonce = 'ieoskirlyzauuv6ehdug8lift65fkrddeuu6f5z6ka'

c-riq · a year ago

> Why is clock skew being used here at all? You're right, it's not actually necessary to use the client clock at all. It was easier to implement it that way initially and I kept it in the description and didn't think about it again.. Thanks for pointing that out. Since all timestamps are measured, the calculations can actually also be made afterwards without using the client clock timestamps at all. However this may add a bit more noise. > not the actual nonce The nonce can only be used once so it's ok to share it afterwards.

c-riq commented on Proof of location for online polls ip-vote.com/geolocation_v... · Posted by u/c-riq

anilr · a year ago

Has this been tested, or is it just an idea. I imagine it would have some very serious limitations. Perhaps it could tell if you are likely in the US or Europe, but I doubt could get much more granular than that.

Starlink internet customers, and users of Apple's private relay (vpn-like service) would all be excluded?

c-riq · a year ago

I tested it from my home and got a radius of about 200 km. But would be nice to get some additional validation. In any case it's not super precise but it adds more friction to manipulation and in conjunction with IP based geolocation and other things it may turn out to be useful for some parts of an online democracy.

c-riq commented on Proof of location for online polls ip-vote.com/geolocation_v... · Posted by u/c-riq

anilr · a year ago

Has this been tested, or is it just an idea. I imagine it would have some very serious limitations. Perhaps it could tell if you are likely in the US or Europe, but I doubt could get much more granular than that.

Starlink internet customers, and users of Apple's private relay (vpn-like service) would all be excluded?

c-riq · a year ago

The goal is to easily get a representative and un-manipulated sample of popular opinion. To achieve that, it might be ok to discriminate against certain users who use connections which cannot prove their location, as long as it's not heavily skewing the results.

c-riq commented on Proof of location for online polls ip-vote.com/geolocation_v... · Posted by u/c-riq

jawiggins · a year ago

> Latency-based geolocation can help protect poll integrity by:

> Detecting when poll responses originate from outside the intended geographic region > Identifying attempts to manipulate polls through elevated VPN/proxy usage

Unless the user also needs to complete a reaction-time test, couldn't this be defeated by using a remote desktop connection to a machine that is physically located in the other geography?

It just shifts which functions need to run on the proxy, from network routing to the browser itself.

c-riq · a year ago

That is true, the location proof is only for the hardware whose IP is used for submitting the vote request. However if remote desktop provider / cloud provider / VPN / Tor IPs are already blocked by the voting platform. Then it would require significant effort to acquire hardware in the target geographic region and equip it with a residential IP. Generally the whole setup only makes sense if IP's (or IP ranges) can only vote once per poll. Then large scale manipulations should become impractical.