Research Summaries

Back Strategies for Large-Scale Active IPv6 Mapping Measurement (SLAMM)

Fiscal Year 2019
Division Graduate School of Operational & Information Sciences
Department Computer Science
Investigator(s) Beverly, Robert E.
Rohrer, Justin P.
Sponsor National Science Foundation (NSF)
Summary As the next generation IP protocol, IPv6, has come into widespread production use, significant effort has been spent in measuring its adoption, performance, and security. However, existing measurement tools and techniques have largely remained unchanged from those of IPv4. While existing techniques may be directly and easily applied, they can yield subpar results, performance, or - worse - impart bias or errors that impact our understanding of the network. In this work, we draw upon recent results that demonstrate the need for IPv6 specific methods for Internet-wide logical network topology mapping.
Accurate and representative network topology maps are vital for content distribution, traffic optimization, network security, and infrastructure protection.
However, current state-of-the-art techniques do not address four IPv6-specific challenges we seek to explore: (i) a large address space that cannot be exhaustively scanned or uniformly sampled effectively; (ii) mandated and aggressive ICMPv6 rate limiting in routers;
(iii) unknown address allocation policies and subnet structures; and (iv) ephemeral and EUI-64 addresses. The first two issues are intertwined: attempting to increase coverage by probing more of the 1Pv6 address space necessitates faster probing rates. However, increasing the probing rate is self-defeating as doing so triggers more rate limiting and, hence, fewer discovered router interfaces and less representative topologies. The second two issues not only impact the choice of measurement strategy, but can potentially compromise user privacy and provider security.
We therefore propose three inter-related and complementary primary thrusts toward advancing the state-of-the-art in 1Pv6 topology mapping:
(i) new strategies for large-scale active probing, that considers both fundamental properties of IPv6 as well as the way 1Pv6 is currently deployed;
(ii) production deployment of these techniques on UCSD's well-established Ark distributed measurement platform so as to facilitate high-quality 1Pv6 topology data collection; and (iii) a better understanding of the security and privacy risks inherent in current IPv6 infrastructure addressing.
Keywords IPv6 Measurement Network Security
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal