6Massive: An Efficient IPv6 Large-Scale Target Generation Framework

IPv6 target generation is essential for conducting rapid Internet-wide scans of IPv6 network assets. Due to the under-utilization of the seed address source and insufficient exploration of seed address structure, existing IPv6 target generation algorithms suffer from limited active address prediction scale and prolonged prediction time, hampering the ability to predict billions of IPv6 active addresses in a few hours. An efficient IPv6 large-scale target generation framework, 6Massive, is proposed. 6Massive introduces a sampling-based IPv6 seed address expansion strategy to improve the utilization rate of the seed address source, a merged divisive hierarchical clustering strategy to fully leverage seed address structural information and expand the low-dimensional IPv6 address pattern space, and a feedback strategy to identify active high-dimensional IPv6 address patterns without the need for extra pre-scanning. Compared to 5 typical algorithms (6Gen, 6Tree, 6Hit, 6Scan, and HMap6), 6Massive demonstrates superior performance across 4 seed address sets (the number ranges from 100 thousand to 1 million). Specifically, 6Massive can probe 156.84% to 533.94% more IPv6 active addresses than these 5 algorithms without the feedback strategy and 279.03% to 484.16% more with it. Within 1.76 days, 6Massive can predict 1.644 billion IPv6 active addresses.