Measurement and Analysis of Adult Websites in IPv6 Networks

The Internet is in the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. At present, researches on IPv6 networks mainly focus on architectural issues, such as routing, addressing, and security; there are few studies on the operational issues of IPv6 networks. Our preliminary observation shows that there are a large amount adult websites and traffic in IPv6 networks. Adult websites can damage health of teenagers and bring operational issues in IPv6 networks. This paper conducts a comprehensive measurement and analysis of the adult websites and traffic in IPv6 networks to help solve these operational issues. The data used in this paper is the raw packet traffic from CNGI-CERNET2 which is a pure IPv6 academic network in China. The duration of the data is from July 2017 to January 2018 and the total amount is 40+ terabytes. We detected about 3000 adult websites in the global IPv6 network. This paper analyzes these adult websites and traffic from the perspectives of websites, users and ISPs respectively. We find that adult websites are still in the developing stage in IPv6 networks and only 30% adult websites with full resources can be accessed in IPv6-only networks. But due to the IPv6-first policy in RFC 4038, adult traffic will continue to migrate to IPv6 networks from IPv4 networks. On the other hand, we find that CDN vendors promote the development of adult websites in IPv6 networks and many adult website owners use muti-domain policies to escape ISPs restricting. Our findings may help ISPs effectively understand adult websites and enhance the restriction of adult content in IPv6 networks.