Passive TCP/IP Geo-Location

Did you know your TCP/IP stack leaks information on your physical location?

This website demonstrates IP address geo-location by passively measuring TCP/IP round-trip times of web requests made to a few servers spread around the world. The measurements are then used to approximate possible physical distances to the servers, and finally drawn on a Google Map. The common area of all circles (that is, the most shaded area) shows your likely location.

Of course, these approximations are rather crude, and hence the usually huge margin of error. Anyway, this site is just a proof-of-concept demonstrating that it is easy to geo-locate a WWW user using just his/her TCP/IP stack while fetching some JavaScript files. Note that the IP address alone is sometimes not reliable for geo-location, and firewalls often block ICMP ping requests.

Sorry, the demo was shut down on 5th July, 2016. Thanks for watching :)

See also: whereami.ovh