Efficient IPv6 Router Interface Discovery

Tao Yang, Zhiping Cai

Abstract: Efficient discovery of router interfaces on the IPv6 Internet is critical for network measurement and cybersecurity. However, existing solutions commonly suffer from inefficiencies due to a lack of initial probing targets (seeds), ultimately exhibiting limitations on large-scale IPv6 networks. Therefore, it is imperative to develop a methodology that enables the efficient collection of IPv6 router interfaces with limited resources, considering the impracticality of conducting a brute-force exploration across the extensive IPv6 address space. In this paper, we introduce Treestrace, an innovative asynchronous prober specifically designed for this purpose. Without prior knowledge of the networks, this tool incrementally adjusts search directions, automatically prioritizing the survey of IPv6 address spaces with a higher concentration of IPv6 router interfaces. Furthermore, we have developed a carefully crafted architecture optimized for probing performance, allowing the tool to probe at the highest theoretically possible rate without requiring excessive computational resources. Real-world tests show that Treestrace outperforms state-of-the-art works on both seed-based and seedless tasks, achieving at least a 5.57-fold efficiency improvement on large-scale IPv6 router interface discovery. With Treestrace, we discovered approximately 8 million IPv6 router interface addresses from a single vantage point within several hours.