Large-Scale Geolocation for NetFlow

The importance of IP address geolocation has increased significantly in recent years, due to its applications in business advertisements and security analysis, among others. Current approaches perform geolocation mostly on-demand and in a small-scale fashion. As soon as geolocation needs to be performed in real-time and in high-speed and large-scale networks, these approaches are not scalable anymore. To solve this problem, we propose two approaches to large-scale geolocation. Firstly, we present an exporter-based approach, which adds geolocation data to flow records in a way that is transparent to any flow collector. Secondly, we present a flow collector-based approach, which adds native geolocation to NetFlow data from any flow exporter. After presenting prototypes for both approaches, we demonstrate the applicability of large-scale geolocation by means of use cases. Our prototypes have shown to be scalable enough for deployment on the 10 Gbps Internet connection of the Masaryk University.