A First Look at Third-Party Service Dependencies of Web Services in Africa

Abstract

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.