Researchers’ viewpoint: Joshua Levett presenting at TMA2025 and RIPE90
26 Jun, 2025
Centred around the challenge of linking network resources controlled by the same entities, my latest work has been the development of WHOactuallyIS? – a tool to detect both Internet resources owned by the same organisation, and the primary organisation behind them.
For instance, it makes what feels like the obvious connection that an Internet resource registered to Instagram or Facebook, is in fact likely to be controlled by their parent company Meta. This is perhaps slightly harder than what you might imagine – often companies give different information to each registry, whether it’s the US company registering IP prefixes with the Regional Internet Registry, or the UK office supplying its details to their local domain name registrar. Perhaps, even, they’ve acquired new resources in a corporate merger and simply haven’t transferred them to the new body.
In the last couple of months I’ve had the opportunity to share some of the outcomes of my research work to narrow this knowledge gap at both the RIPE 90 meeting (a forum of European IP network operators) and the latest Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA 2025), for which you can read the author-copy.
At both venues I’ve had some fascinating discussions: one about the potential to use this work to improve upon the information provided to registries or to facilitate more appropriate action by law enforcement agencies who may rely on misleading or false information provided. Or, interestingly, the potential to use the information returned to help direct corporate decision-making within the context of security and sovereignty – providing quick lookups as part of due diligence processes for procurement.
In any case, research I had intended to use to better understand provider consolidation within the Internet space, sharing my work and discussing its findings has yet again provided new perspectives and avenues I now hope to explore in the final months of my PhD, supported by my supervisors Dr Yadav and Dr Vassilakis.
