TY - GEN
T1 - A First Look at Third-Party Service Dependencies of Web Services in Africa
AU - Kashaf, Aqsa
AU - Dou, Jiachen
AU - Belova, Margarita
AU - Apostolaki, Maria
AU - Agarwal, Yuvraj
AU - Sekar, Vyas
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements. We thank Amreesh Phokeer for their feedback and insights. Furthermore, we greatly appreciate the anonymous reviewers and our shepherd Oliver Gasser for their feedback and comments. We would like to acknowledge the support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through the Upanzi network. This work was also partially supported by NSF Awards TWC-1564009 and SaTC-1801472 and the Carnegie Mellon CyLab Security and Privacy Institute.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - Third-party dependencies expose websites to shared risks and cascading failures. The dependencies impact African websites as well e.g., Afrihost outage in 2022 [15]. While the prevalence of third-party dependencies has been studied for globally popular websites, Africa is largely underrepresented in those studies. Hence, this work analyzes the prevalence of third-party infrastructure dependencies in Africa-centric websites from 4 African vantage points. We consider websites that fall into one of the four categories: Africa-visited (popular in Africa) Africa-hosted (sites hosted in Africa), Africa-dominant (sites targeted towards users in Africa), and Africa-operated (websites operated in Africa). Our key findings are: 1) 93% of the Africa-visited websites critically depend on a third-party DNS, CDN, or CA. In perspective, US-visited websites are up to 25% less critically dependent. 2) 97% of Africa-dominant, 96% of Africa-hosted, and 95% of Africa-operated websites are critically dependent on a third-party DNS, CDN, or CA provider. 3) The use of third-party services is concentrated where only 3 providers can affect 60% of the Africa-centric websites. Our findings have key implications for the present usage and recommendations for the future evolution of the Internet in Africa.
AB - Third-party dependencies expose websites to shared risks and cascading failures. The dependencies impact African websites as well e.g., Afrihost outage in 2022 [15]. While the prevalence of third-party dependencies has been studied for globally popular websites, Africa is largely underrepresented in those studies. Hence, this work analyzes the prevalence of third-party infrastructure dependencies in Africa-centric websites from 4 African vantage points. We consider websites that fall into one of the four categories: Africa-visited (popular in Africa) Africa-hosted (sites hosted in Africa), Africa-dominant (sites targeted towards users in Africa), and Africa-operated (websites operated in Africa). Our key findings are: 1) 93% of the Africa-visited websites critically depend on a third-party DNS, CDN, or CA. In perspective, US-visited websites are up to 25% less critically dependent. 2) 97% of Africa-dominant, 96% of Africa-hosted, and 95% of Africa-operated websites are critically dependent on a third-party DNS, CDN, or CA provider. 3) The use of third-party services is concentrated where only 3 providers can affect 60% of the Africa-centric websites. Our findings have key implications for the present usage and recommendations for the future evolution of the Internet in Africa.
KW - Africa Internet
KW - Availability
KW - CDN
KW - Certificate authorities
KW - DNS
KW - Third-party dependency
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-28486-1_25
DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-28486-1_25
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85151060523
SN - 9783031284854
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 595
EP - 622
BT - Passive and Active Measurement - 24th International Conference, PAM 2023, Proceedings
A2 - Brunstrom, Anna
A2 - Flores, Marcel
A2 - Fiore, Marco
PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
T2 - 24th International Conference on Passive and Active Measurement, PAM 2023
Y2 - 21 March 2023 through 23 March 2023
ER -