Researchers and practitioners often face the issue of having to attribute an IP address to an organization. For current data this is comparably easy, using services like whois or other databases. Similarly, for historic data, several entities like the RIPE NCC provide websites that provide access to historic records. For large-scale network measurement work, though, researchers often have to attribute millions of addresses. For current data, Team Cymru provides a bulk whois service which allows bulk address attribution. However, at the time of writing, there is no service available that allows historic bulk attribution of IP addresses. Hence, in this paper, we introduce and evaluate our 'Back-to-the-Future whois' service, allowing historic bulk attribution of IP addresses on a daily granularity based on CAIDA Routeviews aggregates. We provide this service to the community for free, and also share our implementation so researchers can run instances themselves.

翻译：研究人员和实践者常面临需要将IP地址归属至特定组织的问题。对于当前数据，利用whois或其他数据库服务可相对简便地完成此项工作。类似地，针对历史数据，RIPE NCC等机构已提供访问历史记录的网站平台。然而在大规模网络测量研究中，研究人员往往需对数百万个地址进行归属分析。对于当前数据，Team Cymru提供了支持批量地址归属的批量whois服务。但截至本文撰写时，尚无可用于历史批量IP地址归属的服务。因此，本文提出并评估了基于CAIDA Routeviews聚合数据、支持日粒度历史批量IP地址归属的"回溯式Whois"服务。我们免费向学术界提供该服务，并同步公开实现代码以便研究人员自行部署运行实例。