Biblio

Fast IPv4 scanning has enabled researchers to answer a wealth of new security and measurement questions. However, while increased network speeds and computational power have enabled comprehensive scans of the IPv4 address space, a brute-force approach does not scale to IPv6. Systems are limited to scanning a small fraction of the IPv6 address space and require an algorithmic approach to determine a small set of candidate addresses to probe. In this paper, we first explore the considerations that guide designing such algorithms. We introduce a new approach that identifies dense address space regions from a set of known "seed" addresses and generates a set of candidates to scan. We compare our algorithm 6Gen against Entropy/IP—the current state of the art—finding that we can recover between 1–8 times as many addresses for the five candidate datasets considered in the prior work. However, during our analysis, we uncover widespread IP aliasing in IPv6 networks. We discuss its effect on target generation and explore preliminary approaches for detecting aliased regions.