Overconfident Coordinates: Quantifying Confidence in Traceroute Geolocation (opens in new tab)

Studies of Internet paths often attach router locations to traceroute hops using commercial geolocation databases, rDNS labels, Geofeeds, and IXP metadata. These sources provide useful hints, but they report point locations without calibrated confidence, leaving researchers unable to tell whether a geographic path is trustworthy. We introduce Path Consistency Scoring (PCS), a passive framework that evaluates router geolocation as a path-level co...