Not All Roads Lead to Rome: How VPN Selection Alters What We Measure and Infer about Web Infrastructure
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866910271526666240 |
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| author | Singh, Sachin Kumar Ricci, Robert Gamero-Garrido, Alexander |
| author_facet | Singh, Sachin Kumar Ricci, Robert Gamero-Garrido, Alexander |
| contents | Web-measurement studies treat commercial VPNs as interchangeable vantage points within a country, assuming that any VPN in a particular country is as good as any other. We show that this assumption does not hold: the same country measured through different VPN providers yields materially different conclusions about where endpoints sit, who hosts them, and which physical replicas serve them. Using large-scale browser-based measurements across fourteen countries and four major VPN providers, complemented by targeted DNS and replica-selection probes, we examine sources of this variability across three layers of the VPN-to-endpoint path: vantage identity, name resolution, and replica selection. We find that the variability is driven primarily by layers below the client: commercial VPN providers operate their own in-country DNS infrastructure, often intercepting queries regardless of client configuration; CDNs steer on the exit network, sending identical queries to different replicas; and peering paths route identical DNS answers to different physical facilities. We distill these findings into a set of reporting practices for VPN-based Web measurement. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_30692 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Not All Roads Lead to Rome: How VPN Selection Alters What We Measure and Infer about Web Infrastructure Singh, Sachin Kumar Ricci, Robert Gamero-Garrido, Alexander Networking and Internet Architecture Web-measurement studies treat commercial VPNs as interchangeable vantage points within a country, assuming that any VPN in a particular country is as good as any other. We show that this assumption does not hold: the same country measured through different VPN providers yields materially different conclusions about where endpoints sit, who hosts them, and which physical replicas serve them. Using large-scale browser-based measurements across fourteen countries and four major VPN providers, complemented by targeted DNS and replica-selection probes, we examine sources of this variability across three layers of the VPN-to-endpoint path: vantage identity, name resolution, and replica selection. We find that the variability is driven primarily by layers below the client: commercial VPN providers operate their own in-country DNS infrastructure, often intercepting queries regardless of client configuration; CDNs steer on the exit network, sending identical queries to different replicas; and peering paths route identical DNS answers to different physical facilities. We distill these findings into a set of reporting practices for VPN-based Web measurement. |
| title | Not All Roads Lead to Rome: How VPN Selection Alters What We Measure and Infer about Web Infrastructure |
| topic | Networking and Internet Architecture |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30692 |