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.
@article{arxiv.2508.07506,
title = {Unveiling IPv6 Scanning Dynamics: A Longitudinal Study Using Large Scale Proactive and Passive IPv6 Telescopes},
author = {Hammas Bin Tanveer and Wai Sun Chan and Ricky K. P. Mok and Sebastian Kappes and Philipp Richter and Oliver Gasser and John Ronan and Arthur Berger and kc Claffy},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.07506},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
24 pages, 16 figures, 8 tables, Accepted at ACM CoNEXT 2025 for publication in the Proceedings of the ACM on Networking