IPv6 Hitlists at Scale: Be Careful What You Wish For
Erik Rye, Dave Levin

TL;DR
This paper presents the largest IPv6 active-address list to date, analyzing its benefits for network insights and the significant security and privacy risks associated with larger hitlists.
Contribution
It introduces a 7.9 billion address IPv6 hitlist, significantly larger than previous datasets, and analyzes its implications for network measurement and security.
Findings
Enhanced understanding of IPv6 address allocation and device types
Identification of privacy and security vulnerabilities in large hitlists
Insights into IPv6 deployment and network configurations
Abstract
Today's network measurements rely heavily on Internet-wide scanning, employing tools like ZMap that are capable of quickly iterating over the entire IPv4 address space. Unfortunately, IPv6's vast address space poses an existential threat for Internet-wide scans and traditional network measurement techniques. To address this reality, efforts are underway to develop ``hitlists'' of known-active IPv6 addresses to reduce the search space for would-be scanners. As a result, there is an inexorable push for constructing as large and complete a hitlist as possible. This paper asks: what are the potential benefits and harms when IPv6 hitlists grow larger? To answer this question, we obtain the largest IPv6 active-address list to date: 7.9 billion addresses, 898 times larger than the current state-of-the-art hitlist. Although our list is not comprehensive, it is a significant step forward and…
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Taxonomy
TopicsNetwork Security and Intrusion Detection · Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · IPv6, Mobility, Handover, Networks, Security
