Unveiling IPv6 Scanning Dynamics: A Longitudinal Study Using Large Scale Proactive and Passive IPv6 Telescopes
Author(s)
Tanveer, Hammas Bin
Chan, Echo
Mok, Ricky K. P.
Kappes, Sebastian
Richter, Philipp
Gasser, Oliver
Ronan, John
Berger, Arthur
Claffy, kc
Date Issued
September 4, 2025
Journal
PACM on Networking
Publisher
ACM
Citation
Hammas Bin Tanveer, Echo Chan, Ricky K. P. Mok, Sebastian Kappes, Philipp Richter, Oliver Gasser, John Ronan, Arthur Berger, and kc Claffy. 2025. Unveiling IPv6 Scanning Dynamics: A Longitudinal Study Using Large Scale Proactive and Passive IPv6 Telescopes. Proc. ACM Netw. 3, CoNEXT3, Article 21 (September 2025), 24 pages.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We introduce new tools and vantage points to develop and integrate proactive techniques to attract IPv6 scan traffic, thus enabling its analysis. By deploying the largest-ever IPv6 proactive telescope in a production ISP network, we collected over 600M packets of unsolicited traffic from 1.9k Autonomous Systems in 10 months. We characterized the sources of unsolicited traffic, evaluated the effectiveness of five major features across the network stack, and inferred scanners' sources of target addresses and their strategies.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3749221
