Country-in-the-Middle: Measuring Paths between People and their Governments

TL;DR

This study defines and measures country-in-the-middle (CitM) paths for residents accessing government websites, addressing five key methodological challenges. It proposes a rigorous CitM framework, builds a large-scale baseline methodology, and conducts a two-stage research program (pilot across ~149 countries and a focused study in 11 countries) with extensive manual validation to produce 9,278 traceroutes. The results reveal meaningful patterns in CitM prevalence driven by geography and internet infrastructure, with notable case studies (e.g., Hong Kong as a CitM for Taiwan and Singapore) and a nuanced role for anycast. The work advances understanding of data sovereignty and offers concrete directions for improving measurement practices and future CitM analyses.

Abstract

Understanding where Internet services are hosted, and how users reach them, has captured the interest of government regulators and others concerned with the privacy of data flows. In this paper we focus on government websites -- services which arguably merit a higher expectation of protection against foreign surveillance or interference -- and seek to identify countries in the middle (CitMs): countries that are neither the source nor destination in a path for a resident visiting their online government services. Finding these CitMs raises daunting methodological challenges. We propose a framework to identify CitMs and use a pilot study of 149 countries to refine our methodology before conducting an in-depth measurement study of 11 countries. For our focused study, we compile an extensive set of websites hosting government services and analyze over 9,000 IP-level paths from vantage points in those countries to these services. We conduct extensive manual validation to corroborate or discard paths based on the aforementioned challenges, and discuss paths that experience unexpected CitMs.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: A visualization of our taxonomy. Colors and border patterns indicate the country hosting the client, website, or intermediate hop(s).
• Figure 2: Overview of government domain collection.
• Figure 3: Frequency of CitMs for each country in our pilot study. Traceroutes are normalized by the number of vantage points. Bolded countries indicate countries of focus in our subsequent study.
• Figure 4: The CDF of the maximum number of consecutive unlabeled hops per traceroute for each of the countries we study.
• Figure 5: Frequency of CitMs in each country's results after data sanitization. Enclosing rectangles show the number of paths for each country before sanitization.