Classifying Data Center IP Addresses in Phoenix Web Applications with Radix Trees

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2022-05-12 16:30:11

Several cloud hosting companies publish the IP address ranges of their services. Examples include AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle, and DigitalOcean. This information is useful to website owners, because the expected behavior of a client coming from a cloud server is different from a residential IP address. Consider a website that sells concert tickets, and wants to prevent bots from quickly purchasing all available tickets. The website owner notices that when tickets go on sale, hundreds of clients with data center IP addresses are making automated requests, purchasing tickets for resale before real visitors can.

This tutorial will demonstrate how to classify incoming requests to a Phoenix web application. This is based on a comparison of the request’s IP address with a data structure containing the IP ranges of several cloud providers. It will cover:

The example of classifying IP addresses as belonging to cloud providers is meant as a concrete example to demonstrate several concepts related to Elixir programming and Phoenix web applications. The relevant code may be found on Github, see https://github.com/paraxialio/taxon