A survey of IPv6 address scanning techniques

Current scanning techniques are capable of rapidly covering the entire IPv4 address space. However, for the almost endless address space of IPv6, it is impossible to use current scanning techniques to scan for hundreds of millions of years. In recent years, numerous researchers have developed various heuristic based IPv6 address scanning methods to address this issue. These methods effectively reduce the scope of addresses that need to be scanned by utilizing collected initial IPv6 addresses as starting points, and generating a list of potentially active IPv6 addresses to focus on for scanning. This paper systematically categorizes, organizes, and reviews these seed-address-based techniques, and it thoroughly examines the strengths and weaknesses of each algorithm. This paper selects addresses from the latest publicly available dataset, Hitlist, to serve as seed addresses. Through experiments, a comprehensive comparison of 11 address scanning techniques is conducted, and a tool for the automated evaluation of address scanning techniques is developed.