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Background Research on the Best Residential Proxies (Series 2)

What are residential proxies?

Proxy residential services are a booming business today. During our research period, we witnessed the emergence of new residential proxies services and the rapid growth of existing businesses. For example, the price of the first residential proxies service we found went from $3 to $25 per GB in 6 months. Similar to traditional proxies such as private networks, anonymity networks, and SOCKS5 proxy, residential proxy services are promoted as a channel of anonymity characterized by high resistance to server-side detection and blocking. Specifically, registered proxy residential tend to be more trusted by servers. In addition, these IPs are usually dynamic, and Residential Proxies services usually operate in a reverse connection proxies mode, enabling clients to respond flexibly and quickly switch to other IPs when detected.

Figure 1 below illustrates the residential IP proxy service model from previous research, which involves three interacting parts: the main service components including the proxies gateway and residential host, the client, and the destination server. Once a client registers for the residential IP proxies service, it receives an IP address or URL of the gateway to access the service. During the communication process, the gateway forwards the client's request to different residential hosts, which further sends the request to the target and obtains the response. Figure 1 depicts what can be observed externally, from the perspective of the client and the target.

Residential Proxies Service Providers and their Operations

There are residential proxies service providers in the market such as ProxyLite. they offer various service plans with different degrees of flexibility. For example a client can choose from three different proxy selection modes: dynamic Residential Proxies, unlimited traffic package proxies, and static residential proxies, depending on the way the gateway tries to send multiple requests using the same residential location. Dynamic Residential (traffic billing): suitable for services that require flexibility and small amount of data, such as crawlers, account registration, and advertisements; Unlimited Traffic Package (bandwidth billing): suitable for services that require large amount of transmitted data, such as youtube video uploads; and Static Residential (hourly billing): suitable for services that require long-term, stable IP, such as opening a store.

In addition, the client can decide whether to resolve the target's domain name by residential IP or gateway. This is important because the target's DNS servers may observe the resolver and in some cases need to mask the location of the resolver.

IP database of residential proxies

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) assigns IP addresses to five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), including ARIN, APNIC, AFRINIC, LACNIC, and RIPE.Each RIR operates a Whois directory service to manage IP address registrations within its region (e.g., RIPE is responsible for the European region).The Whois directory is organized in an object-oriented organization and contains four types of objects, each assigned a unique ID: inetnum, person, organization, and ASN. the inetnum object describes a range of IP addresses and all of its attributes; the organization and person objects are used to denote the ownership of a block of IPs and contain a set of attributes such as an e-mail address; and the ASN identifies the autonomous system to which the IP address belongs. All inetnums are created hierarchically to form an inetnum tree. Given an IP, we define its direct inetnum as the object whose IP range covers the IP, its direct owner as the organization and person objects associated with its direct inetnum, and its loose owner as all organizations and persons sharing the same contact information.

Benefits of Residential Proxies Service

Improved Privacy and Security

Residential IP proxies provide increased privacy and security. The fact that these IPs are those of regular home users makes it more difficult for requests using these proxies to be detected and blocked by the target service. This is especially helpful for users who need to perform activities such as multiple account management, ad verification, and market research across different platforms.

Conclusion

The Residential IP Proxies service is a powerful tool that offers increased privacy and security along with useful features such as multi-account management and data crawling. Through the judicious use of residential IP proxies, organizations and individuals can improve the privacy and efficiency of their network operations. Our research methods and techniques further validate the advantages of residential IP proxies services and provide new perspectives for future cybersecurity research.