6Seeks: A Global IPv6 Network Periphery Scanning System

Discovering the IPv6 network periphery, i.e., the last-hop router connecting endhosts in the IPv6 Internet, is crucial for network measurement and Internet reconnaissance. However, existing solutions commonly suffer from inefficiency when applied on a global scale due to the vast IPv6 address space. To tackle this challenge, we developed <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">6Seeks</i>, an innovative IPv6 scanning system designed for efficient IPv6 periphery discovery across the global IPv6 Internet without requiring seed IPv6 addresses. Specifically, we proposed to employ a heuristic method for collecting active /48 networks from the global BGP prefixes and then adopt a reinforcement learning-based dynamic probing strategy to optimize resource allocation across these networks and significantly improve efficiency. Real-world tests demonstrate that <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">6Seeks</i> outperforms all existing methods in global-scale IPv6 periphery measurement experiments. In just a few hours, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">6Seeks</i> can identify over 128 million IPv6 periphery devices, while using only 37% of the probing resources required by the current state-of-the-art solution. Compared to existing public datasets, the IPv6 addresses identified by <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">6Seeks</i> are more numerous and display unique characteristics, significantly enriching our IPv6 corpus.