ATOPOS: Dynamic Path Exploration with Adaptive Probe Construction for Extensive and Efficient Network Topology Discovery

Network topology discovery is fundamental for understanding the structure of the Internet and for identifying security vulnerabilities. Although techniques such as Paris Traceroute have improved the reliability of path discovery, they remain challenging due to the limitations of the technique in adaptability and discovery effectiveness, particularly in terms of extensiveness and efficiency, especially as modern networks evolve toward highly dynamic and cloud-centric architectures. We present ATOPOS, the dynamic path exploration with adaptive probe construction method, to improve the above issues in large-scale topology discovery. First, ATOPOS selects the most responsive protocol and reliable fields to construct probes that adapt to the target network. Then, based on the adaptive probe, ATOPOS dynamically adjusts the probing path upper bound estimated by the discovered topology state and early stops by increment awareness pruning during the probing. At the same probing scale, ATOPOS discovers 1.36 times as many nodes and 2.98 times as many edges as state-of-the-art methods. We deploy ATOPOS across 29 Amazon regions to demonstrate its capability for uncovering cloud structures in large, dynamic network environments. We identify 4,060 critical nodes and 33,539 boundary routing nodes, and gather latency information to support deeper insights for future research.