Discovering the IPv6 Network Periphery

The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44081-7_1We consider the problem of discovering the IPv6 network periphery, i.e., the last hop router connecting endhosts in the IPv6 Internet. Finding the IPv6 periphery using active probing is challenging due to the IPv6 address space size, wide variety of provider addressing and subnetting schemes, and incomplete topology traces. As such, existing topology mapping systems can miss the large footprint of the IPv6 periphery, disadvantaging applications ranging from IPv6 census studies to geolocation and network resilience. We introduce “edgy,” an approach to explicitly discover the IPv6 network periphery, and use it to find > 64M IPv6 periphery router addresses and > 87M links to these last hops – several orders of magnitude more than in currently available IPv6 topologies. Further, only 0.2% of edgy’s discovered addresses are known to existing IPv6 hitlists.This work supported in part by NSF grant CNS-1855614.This work supported in part by NSF grant CNS-1855614