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 - 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 -