Towards Internet-Wide IPv6 Network Periphery Discovery

On this website we present additional information about our INFOCOM 2025 paper "Pruning as Scanning: Towards Internet-Wide IPv6 Network Periphery Discovery" and provide access to our IPv6 Periphery Service.

Contact: Tao Yang : lattetao@outlook.com

Explore the Data

We continuously scan the Internet-wide IPv6 periphery, completing a full pass every 6 hours. Below is a recent snapshot of our dataset and samples of responsive addresses for two well-known prefixes.

Public queries http://159.195.149.250/query?prefix=<YOUR_PREFIX>: /48 or more specific only; broader prefixes (e.g., /32) require registration.

Sample prefix: 2001:558:142::/48 (Comcast · AS7922)

Responsive IPv6 addresses discovered under this prefix. This snapshot is refreshed automatically alongside the dataset.

Query this prefix directly with curl:

curl -sS -m 30 "http://159.195.149.250/query?prefix=2001:558:142::/48"

Or open it in your browser: http://159.195.149.250/query?prefix=2001:558:142::/48

Result (address, last seen):

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Sample prefix: 2a0d:3341:b300::/48 (SpaceX Starlink · AS14593 · Berlin)

Responsive IPv6 addresses discovered under this prefix. This snapshot is refreshed automatically alongside the dataset.

Query this prefix directly with curl:

curl -sS -m 30 "http://159.195.149.250/query?prefix=2a0d:3341:b300::/48"

Or open it in your browser: http://159.195.149.250/query?prefix=2a0d:3341:b300::/48

Result (address, last seen):

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IPv6 Periphery Service

We provide an IPv6 Periphery Service where we publish responsive IPv6 periphery addresses to interested researchers. Access to the complete database is granted by application.

Apply for Access

We provide query access to our complete scan database for in-depth research on IPv6 network periphery, including concrete IPv6 addresses.

Access is granted by application and is free of charge for research purposes. Approved applicants receive a key that grants query access to the complete scan database. To apply, send a quick application email.

For commercial use, please contact us for further consultation.

Referencing the Periphery Service

If you use data from the IPv6 Periphery Service in your publication, please cite:

@inproceedings{yang2025pruning,
  title     = {{Pruning as Scanning: Towards Internet-Wide IPv6 Network Periphery Discovery}},
  author    = {Yang, Tao and Hu, Ling and Hou, Bingnan and Yang, Zhenzhong and Cai, Zhiping},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Communications},
  pages     = {1--10},
  year      = {2025},
  organization = {IEEE}
}

@article{yang20256seeks,
  title     = {{6Seeks: A Global IPv6 Network Periphery Scanning System}},
  author    = {Yang, Tao and Hou, Bingnan and Yang, Yifan and Yang, Zhenzhong and Cai, Zhiping},
  journal   = {IEEE Transactions on Networking},
  volume    = {33},
  number    = {5},
  pages     = {2779--2793},
  year      = {2025},
  doi       = {10.1109/TON.2025.3575443}
}

Publications

Full papers are available for download:

Software and Tools

During our IPv6 periphery analysis we developed and used the following tools. We publish them for use by the scientific community:

YMap

YMap is a modular IPv6 single-packet scanner written in modern C++ (C++20). It is designed for Internet-wide IPv6 periphery discovery, and is also useful for IPv6 research, security testing, and topology analysis.

• Single-packet scanning
• Two scan modes: iplist (address list) and prefix (network prefix expansion)
• Pluggable probe modules
• Multi-threaded sending with token-bucket rate limiting
• Real-time monitoring dashboard

Source: github.com/latteyt/ymap