Breaking the Seed Barrier: Discovering Active IPv6 Addresses in Seedless Scenarios

Active address probing is fundamental to large-scale network measurement, asset discovery, and security assessment. Although scenarios with seed addresses have witnessed substantial progress, research in seedless scenarios remains nascent, hindered by a lack of general patterns and the restricted applicability of probing methods, leading to a limited probing boundary and low probing efficiency. We propose 6Genos, a system for active IPv6 address discovery in seedless scenarios. Specifically, 6Genos begins by extracting patterns from seed addresses and identifying general ones to form a pattern library. It then constructs a General Pattern Genealogy Graph to model the hierarchical relationships among these patterns. Finally, it adopts a heuristic dynamic migration probing that adaptively incorporates feedback to achieve precise pattern matching and optimal resource utilization. Experimental results show that 6Genos achieves a hit rate of 1.32% 2.34%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 323% 631%. Its coverage reaches 29.33% 31.83%, with 11% 46% improvement. Moreover, 6Genos completes large-scale probing 9.76× faster. By continuously probing all seedless BGP prefixes, 6Genos discovers 1.85B active IPv6 addresses across 46,156 BGP prefixes, significantly expanding the active address boundary and enabling broader-scale IPv6 research.