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 6Seeks, 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 6Seeks outperforms all existing methods in global-scale IPv6 periphery measurement experiments. In just a few hours, 6Seeks 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 6Seeks are more numerous and display unique characteristics, significantly enriching our IPv6 corpus.