Luori: Active Probing and Evaluation of Internet-Wide IPv6 Fully Responsive Prefixes

With the large-scale deployment and application of IPv6, IPv6 network measurements will become increasingly important. However, a special type of IPv6 prefix called Fully Responsive Prefix (FRP) is having a significant impact on IPv6 measurement campaigns, which is defined as all addresses under a prefix responding to scans. Obviously, there cannot be a real responder behind each of these addresses. To reveal the current status and impact of Internet-wide IPv6 FRPs, we propose for the first time an active probing method for Internet-wide IPv6 FRPs, Luori, which transforms the active probing process under IPv6 huge prefix space (potential range of prefix presence) into a dynamic search process in a tree based on reinforcement learning, achieving efficient probing of arbitrary routing prefixes. The evaluation results show that Luori found 31.7K largest FRPs in a single Internet-wide probing with 11 M budget, covering <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$1.5 \times 10^{30}$</tex> address space, which is <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$10^{6} \times$</tex> that of existing methods. More importantly, after six months of Internet-wide probing, we have found 516 K largest FRPs, which covers <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$1.3 \times 10^{33}$</tex> address space and 795 ASes, making it the largest publicly known FRP list. Based on this list, we screen out <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$20 \%$</tex> of the addresses covered by FRPs from a well-known IPv6 active address dataset. Furthermore, we further analyze and find that the distribution of these FRPs is extensive and their implementation methods are diverse, which can provide beneficial references for the practical application of FRPs. We also make this list publicly available and maintain it long-term for use and study by relevant researchers.