arXiv subjects

Erik Rye

Publications and source records attributed to Erik Rye.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

6SEVEN: System for EValuating IPv6 ENumeration algorithms

The vast, sparsely populated, and often ephemeral IPv6 address space makes discovering active addresses challenging. In response, the community has developed over thirty different IPv6 Target Generation Algorithms (TGAs). TGAs learn addressing structure from seed (training) datasets, build a representative model, and generate candidate addresses. Unfortunately, the existing literature employs a wide variety of input seeds, data cleansing, and metrics of success that prevent ready comparison. Toward making TGA evaluation consistent, we present 6SEVEN, an extensible framework that hosts TGAs as plugins and links them to shared data cleaning, probing, dealiasing, and result tabulation components. We port as 6SEVEN plugins eight popular TGAs and demonstrate a controlled case study. Our results show that the performance of these TGAs varies substantially due to factors independent of the main algorithm---especially the seed set composition, dealiasing, and tabulation procedures. We observe tradeoffs between desirable features of TGA performance, including yield and exploration. We envision 6SEVEN as an enabling community resource to advance the science of current and future TGAs, and, by extension, IPv6 measurement.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

Cleaning the NTP Pool: Detecting and Mitigating NTP-Sourced IPv6 Scanning

The ephemeral and random nature of IPv6 client addresses presents a practical challenge to attacks that depend on Internet-wide scanning or reconnaissance -- the adversary must first \emph{find} the client's IPv6 address. While a well-positioned passive adversary can potentially harvest some active IPv6 client addresses, such power is typically reserved for e.g. large CDN or Internet exchange points. In contrast, prior work has shown the feasibility of a low-power entity to easily join the volunteer-based NTP Pool and harvest large quantities of active IPv6 client addresses. In this work, we develop a methodology to not only rigorously identify such IPv6 address harvesting and the entities gathering addresses, but also characterize \emph{what} these entities subsequently do with the addresses. Specifically, we query all NTP Pool servers across the global Internet over the course of one-year using unique IPv6 client addresses, and monitor and correlate any later activity targeting these addresses. In sum, we identify 22 NTP Pool servers, within 4 primary clusters, that are part of larger monitoring infrastructures that utilize the gathered addresses for reconnaissance, port scanning, and service and vulnerability enumeration. To better understand the legal and ethical gray area of such behavior, we both engage with the NTP Pool operators and a cybersecurity insurance firm running one of the harvesting and scanning clusters. We are in discussions with the NTP Pool to integrate our system into their monitoring infrastructure to remove such NTP servers, and the cybersecurity insurance firm changed its operational policy to be more transparent and provide clear opt-out mechanisms.

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arXiv2026

On Borrowed Time: Measurement-Informed Understanding of the NTP Pool's Robustness to Monopoly Attacks

Internet services and applications depend critically on the availability and acc uracy of network time. The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is one of the oldest core network protocols and remains the de facto mechanism for clock synchronization across the Internet today. While multiple NTP infrastructures exist, one, the "NTP Pool," presents an attractive attack target for two basic reasons, it is: 1) administratively distributed and based on volunteer servers; and 2) heavily utilized, including by IoT and infrastructure devices worldwide. We %develop measurements to gather the first direct, non-inferential, and comprehensive data on the NTP pool, including: longitudinal server and account membership, server configurations, time quality, aliases, and global query traffic load. We gather complete and granular data over a nine month period to discover over 15k servers (both active and inactive) and shed new light into the NTP Pool's use, dynamics, and robustness. By analyzing address aliases, accounts, and network connectivity, we find that only 19.7% of the pool's active servers are fully independent. Finally, we show that an adversary informed with our data can better and more precisely mount "monopoly attacks" to capture the preponderance of NTP pool traffic in 90% of all countries with only 10 or fewer malicious NTP servers. Our results suggest multiple avenues by which the robustness of the pool can be improved.

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arXiv2025

WikIPedia: Unearthing a 20-Year History of IPv6 Client Addressing

Due to their article editing policies, Wikimedia sites like Wikipedia have become inadvertent time capsules for IPv6 addresses. When Wikimedia users make edits without signing into an account, their IP addresses are used in lieu of a username. Wikimedia site dumps therefore provide researchers with over two decades worth of timestamped client IPv6 addresses to understand address assignments and how they have changed over time and space. In this work, we extract 19M unique IPv6 addresses from Wikimedia sites like Wikipedia that were used by editors from 2003 to 2024. We use these addresses to understand the prevalence of IPv6 in countries corresponding to Wikimedia site languages, how IPv6 adoption has grown over time, and the prevalence of EUI-64 addressing on client devices like desktops, laptops, and mobile phones.

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arXiv2025

Where Have All the Firewalls Gone? Security Consequences of Residential IPv6 Transition

IPv4 NAT has limited the spread of IoT botnets considerably by default-denying bots' incoming connection requests to in-home devices unless the owner has explicitly allowed them. As the Internet transitions to majority IPv6, however, residential connections no longer require the use of NAT. This paper therefore asks: has the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 ultimately made residential networks more vulnerable to attack, thereby empowering the next generation of IPv6-based IoT botnets? To answer this question, we introduce a large-scale IPv6 scanning methodology that, unlike those that rely on AI, can be run on low-resource devices common in IoT botnets. We use this methodology to perform the largest-scale measurement of IPv6 residential networks to date, and compare which devices are publicly accessible to comparable IPv4 networks. We were able to receive responses from 14.0M distinct IPv6 addresses inside of residential networks (i.e., not the external-facing gateway), in 2,436 ASes across 118 countries. These responses come from protocols commonly exploited by IoT botnets (including telnet and FTP), as well as protocols typically associated with end-user devices (including iPhone-Sync and IPP). Comparing to IPv4, we show that we are able to reach more printers, iPhones, and smart lights over IPv6 than full IPv4-wide scans could. Collectively, our results show that NAT has indeed acted as the de facto firewall of the Internet, and the v4-to-v6 transition of residential networks is opening up new devices to attack.

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arXiv2025

Buy it Now, Track Me Later: Attacking User Privacy via Wi-Fi AP Online Auctions

Static and hard-coded layer-two network identifiers are well known to present security vulnerabilities and endanger user privacy. In this work, we introduce a new privacy attack against Wi-Fi access points listed on secondhand marketplaces. Specifically, we demonstrate the ability to remotely gather a large quantity of layer-two Wi-Fi identifiers by programmatically querying the eBay marketplace and applying state-of-the-art computer vision techniques to extract IEEE 802.11 BSSIDs from the seller's posted images of the hardware. By leveraging data from a global Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) that geolocates BSSIDs, we obtain the physical locations of these devices both pre- and post-sale. In addition to validating the degree to which a seller's location matches the location of the device, we examine cases of device movement -- once the device is sold and then subsequently re-used in a new environment. Our work highlights a previously unrecognized privacy vulnerability and suggests, yet again, the strong need to protect layer-two network identifiers.

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arXiv2024

Surveilling the Masses with Wi-Fi-Based Positioning Systems

Wi-Fi-based Positioning Systems (WPSes) are used by modern mobile devices to learn their position using nearby Wi-Fi access points as landmarks. In this work, we show that Apple's WPS can be abused to create a privacy threat on a global scale. We present an attack that allows an unprivileged attacker to amass a worldwide snapshot of Wi-Fi BSSID geolocations in only a matter of days. Our attack makes few assumptions, merely exploiting the fact that there are relatively few dense regions of allocated MAC address space. Applying this technique over the course of a year, we learned the precise locations of over 2 billion BSSIDs around the world. The privacy implications of such massive datasets become more stark when taken longitudinally, allowing the attacker to track devices' movements. While most Wi-Fi access points do not move for long periods of time, many devices -- like compact travel routers -- are specifically designed to be mobile. We present several case studies that demonstrate the types of attacks on privacy that Apple's WPS enables: We track devices moving in and out of war zones (specifically Ukraine and Gaza), the effects of natural disasters (specifically the fires in Maui), and the possibility of targeted individual tracking by proxy -- all by remotely geolocating wireless access points. We provide recommendations to WPS operators and Wi-Fi access point manufacturers to enhance the privacy of hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Finally, we detail our efforts at responsibly disclosing this privacy vulnerability, and outline some mitigations that Apple and Wi-Fi access point manufacturers have implemented both independently and as a result of our work.

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arXiv2023

Visualizing MAC and IPv6 Address Allocations

In this work, I describe a method for visualizing two types of network address allocations: Media Access Control (MAC) addresses -- hardware identifiers permanently assigned to network interfaces -- and Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) allocations -- subnetworks assigned from a larger, encompassing network (e.g., allocated /64 networks from a /48 network).

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arXiv2023

IPv6 Hitlists at Scale: Be Careful What You Wish For

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 provides a glimpse into the type of analyses possible with more complete hitlists. We compare our dataset to prior IPv6 hitlists and show both benefits and dangers. The benefits include improved insight into client devices (prior datasets consist primarily of routers), outage detection, IPv6 roll-out, previously unknown aliased networks, and address assignment strategies. The dangers, unfortunately, are severe: we expose widespread instances of addresses that permit user tracking and device geolocation, and a dearth of firewalls in home networks. We discuss ethics and security guidelines to ensure a safe path towards more complete hitlists.

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arXiv2022

IPvSeeYou: Exploiting Leaked Identifiers in IPv6 for Street-Level Geolocation

We present IPvSeeYou, a privacy attack that permits a remote and unprivileged adversary to physically geolocate many residential IPv6 hosts and networks with street-level precision. The crux of our method involves: 1) remotely discovering wide area (WAN) hardware MAC addresses from home routers; 2) correlating these MAC addresses with their WiFi BSSID counterparts of known location; and 3) extending coverage by associating devices connected to a common penultimate provider router. We first obtain a large corpus of MACs embedded in IPv6 addresses via high-speed network probing. These MAC addresses are effectively leaked up the protocol stack and largely represent WAN interfaces of residential routers, many of which are all-in-one devices that also provide WiFi. We develop a technique to statistically infer the mapping between a router's WAN and WiFi MAC addresses across manufacturers and devices, and mount a large-scale data fusion attack that correlates WAN MACs with WiFi BSSIDs available in wardriving (geolocation) databases. Using these correlations, we geolocate the IPv6 prefixes of $>$12M routers in the wild across 146 countries and territories. Selected validation confirms a median geolocation error of 39 meters. We then exploit technology and deployment constraints to extend the attack to a larger set of IPv6 residential routers by clustering and associating devices with a common penultimate provider router. While we responsibly disclosed our results to several manufacturers and providers, the ossified ecosystem of deployed residential cable and DSL routers suggests that our attack will remain a privacy threat into the foreseeable future.

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arXiv2020

Reading In-Between the Lines: An Analysis of Dissenter

Efforts by content creators and social networks to enforce legal and policy-based norms, e.g. blocking hate speech and users, has driven the rise of unrestricted communication platforms. One such recent effort is Dissenter, a browser and web application that provides a conversational overlay for any web page. These conversations hide in plain sight - users of Dissenter can see and participate in this conversation, whereas visitors using other browsers are oblivious to their existence. Further, the website and content owners have no power over the conversation as it resides in an overlay outside their control. In this work, we obtain a history of Dissenter comments, users, and the websites being discussed, from the initial release of Dissenter in Feb. 2019 through Apr. 2020 (14 months). Our corpus consists of approximately 1.68M comments made by 101k users commenting on 588k distinct URLs. We first analyze macro characteristics of the network, including the user-base, comment distribution, and growth. We then use toxicity dictionaries, Perspective API, and a Natural Language Processing model to understand the nature of the comments and measure the propensity of particular websites and content to elicit hateful and offensive Dissenter comments. Using curated rankings of media bias, we examine the conditional probability of hateful comments given left and right-leaning content. Finally, we study Dissenter as a social network, and identify a core group of users with high comment toxicity.

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arXiv2017

SDN as Active Measurement Infrastructure

Active measurements are integral to the operation and management of networks, and invaluable to supporting empirical network research. Unfortunately, it is often cost-prohibitive and logistically difficult to widely deploy measurement nodes, especially in the core. In this work, we consider the feasibility of tightly integrating measurement within the infrastructure by using Software Defined Networks (SDNs). We introduce "SDN as Active Measurement Infrastructure" (SAAMI) to enable measurements to originate from any location where SDN is deployed, removing the need for dedicated measurement nodes and increasing vantage point diversity. We implement ping and traceroute using SAAMI, as well as a proof-of-concept custom measurement protocol to demonstrate the power and ease of SAAMI's open framework. Via a large-scale measurement campaign using SDN switches as vantage points, we show that SAAMI is accurate, scalable, and extensible.

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