With the large-scale deployment of IPv6, it is becoming more and more important to probe active IPv6 addresses on the global Internet. However, the vast address space and the random distribution of active addresses make the probing process full of challenges, especially for the probing of IPv6 prefixes without seed addresses. Furthermore, the widespread existence of IPv6 aliased prefixes also causes significant trouble for probing. In this paper, we presentAddrProbe, an active IPv6 address probing system, which dynamically probes all global routing prefixes based on learned fine-grained address patterns from limited seed addresses and quickly detects aliased prefixes during probing. The evaluation results show thatAddrProbeachieves a hit rate of 23%-45% with all routing prefixes announced by the BGP system, which is 6.6-13× that of current state-of-the-art approaches (no more than 4%). Moreover, we find 1.2×1033aliased addresses characterized by the detected aliased prefixes, covering 6,412 routing prefixes, which is a 107× and 5.9× improvement over existing methods, respectively. Finally, an IPv6 Hitlist is constructed based on the long-term probing results, which contains 562M addresses covering 190K routing prefixes and 29K ASes. These widely distributed addresses are meaningful for analyzing IPv6 address assignments and some other IPv6 measurement activities.

With the large-scale deployment and application of IPv6, IPv6 network measurements will become increasingly important. However, a special type of IPv6 prefix called Fully Responsive Prefix (FRP) is having a significant impact on IPv6 measurement campaigns, which is defined as all addresses under a prefix responding to scans. Obviously, there cannot be a real responder behind each of these addresses. To reveal the current status and impact of Internet-wide IPv6 FRPs, we propose for the first time an active probing method for Internet-wide IPv6 FRPs, Luori, which transforms the active probing process under IPv6 huge prefix space (potential range of prefix presence) into a dynamic search process in a tree based on reinforcement learning, achieving efficient probing of arbitrary routing prefixes. The evaluation results show that Luori found 31.7K largest FRPs in a single Internet-wide probing with 11 M budget, covering$1.5 \times 10^{30}$address space, which is$10^{6} \times$that of existing methods. More importantly, after six months of Internet-wide probing, we have found 516 K largest FRPs, which covers$1.3 \times 10^{33}$address space and 795 ASes, making it the largest publicly known FRP list. Based on this list, we screen out$20 \%$of the addresses covered by FRPs from a well-known IPv6 active address dataset. Furthermore, we further analyze and find that the distribution of these FRPs is extensive and their implementation methods are diverse, which can provide beneficial references for the practical application of FRPs. We also make this list publicly available and maintain it long-term for use and study by relevant researchers.