THIS REPORT HAS BEEN WITHDRAWN

Austin Murdock

EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley

Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2022-9

May 1, 2022

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/Withdrawn/EECS-2022-9.pdf

Internet-wide IPv4 scanners enable researchers to exhaustively probe the entire IPv4 address space in under 5 minutes. This capability is extremely beneficial for academic researchers and industry practitioners because it enables them to quickly measure properties about every globally reachable host connected to the Internet on IPv4. This benefit motivates us to conduct Internet-wide scans on IPv4’s successor IPv6. Unfortunately, exhaustively probing the IPv6 address space is impossible because it is 2^96 times larger than the IPv4 address space. In this work, we aim to enable IPv6 measurement studies comparable to the comprehensive assessments currently possible on IPv4. We consider the basic problem of how to determine addresses that are likely to prove fruitful for scanning as an alternative to exhaustive search. We introduce 6Gen, an algorithm that identifies regions of the IPv6 address space likely to contain active addresses and demonstrate its effectiveness with train-and-test evaluations on address datasets from related work and live scans. Then we develop 6Map, an adaptive Internet-wide IPv6 scanner. At its core, 6Map instruments 6Gen to generate and probe candidate addresses while managing organizational load balancing. We extend 6Map’s functionality with adaptive probing to modify the candidate list of addresses during the scan and demonstrate that it significantly improves 6Map’s efficiency and effectiveness. We use 6Map to perform Internet-wide scans and discover 68M reachable IPv6 addresses. We also perform Internet-wide IPv4 scans and discover 406M reachable IPv4 addresses. We port-scan the addresses in our dataset to explore how Internet-wide IPv6 scans could enrich the measurement data collected by researchers and how IPv6 deployment might change an organization’s attack surface.

Advisors: Vern Paxson

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