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Residential Proxies: A Double-Edged Sword for Network Research

Speaker:
Christoff Visser, IIJ - Research Lab
Date:
Time:
Room:
Main Room
Session:
Plenary
Duration:
10 min
Transcript:
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Meetecho chat:
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Type:
Lightning Talk
Slides:

Abstract

Residential proxies offer an unprecedented perspective of the Internet, with multiple providers claiming access to over 150 million real end-user vantage points. Compared to active RIPE Atlas probes, even smaller proxy providers often offer orders of magnitude more vantage points, commonly exceeding 1 million, available for use by researchers and enterprises. This raises critical questions: How are these vantage points obtained? More importantly, can we be certain that end-users have explicitly consented to their devices being used as proxies? This presentation aims to stimulate discussion about residential proxy services, exploring how the unique research insights they provide should be balanced against the ethical uncertainties and security risks they introduce.

Recording

Speaker

Christoff Visser

Christoff Visser

Christoff holds a Bachelor's in Computing and Mathematical Science from the University of Waikato. He is currently a researcher at the Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ) research lab and has a background in Software Defined Networking and network automation tool development. His current topics include Internet resiliency in the Pacific, and designing and building platforms to simplify teaching and testing networks, aiming to make network education more accessible.

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