6Map: Enabling Fast Active IPv6 Address Discovery with Programmable Switches

The vast address space of IPv6 makes it impractical to apply exhaustive scanning to survey the entire network. Existing studies that aim to quickly discover active IPv6 addresses by optimizing the scanning space face issues of poor scalability and high time complexity, which hinder a comprehensive under-standing of the IPv6 network and impede the timely provision of security snapshots. Fortunately, the emergence of programmable switches provides an opportunity to address the above issues. To this end, we propose 6Map, a fast active IPv6 address discovery system based on programmable switches. We design a lightweight target generation algorithm running on the control plane of the programmable switch and implement fast scanning address generation on the switch ASIC. The experimental results show that the efficiency of IPv6 active address discovery increases by 40.1 × compared to the state-of-the-art method with a 100M probe budget.