6Rover: Leveraging Reinforcement Learning-based Address Pattern Mining Approach for Discovering Active Targets in IPv6 Unseeded Space

Abstract

The discovery of active IPv6 addresses represents a pivotal challenge in IPv6 network survey, as it is a prerequisite for downstream tasks such as network topology measurements and security analysis. With the rapid spread of IPv6 networks in recent years, many researchers have focused on improving the hit rate, efficiency, and coverage of IPv6 scanning methods, resulting in considerable advancements. However, existing approaches remain heavily dependent on seed addresses, thereby limiting their effectiveness in unseeded prefixes. Consequently, this paper proposes 6Rover, a reinforcement learning-based model for active address discovery in unseeded environments. To overcome the reliance on seeded addresses, 6Rover constructs patterns with higher generality that reflects the actual address allocation strategies of network administrators, thereby avoiding biased transfers of patterns from seeded to unseeded prefixes. After that, 6Rover employs a multi-armed bandit model to optimize the probing resource allocation when applying patterns to unseeded spaces. It models the challenge of discovering optimal patterns in unseeded spaces as an exploration-exploitation dilemma, and progressively uncover the potential patterns applied in unseeded spaces, leading to the efficient discovery of active addresses without seed address as the prior knowledge. Experiments on large-scale unseeded datasets show that 6Rover has a higher hit rate than existing methods in the absence of any seed addresses as prior knowledge. In real network environments, 6Rover achieved a 5% - 8% hit rate in seedless spaces with 100 million budget scale, representing an approximate 200\% improvement over the existing state-of-the-art methods.