Backscatter is often used to detect various kinds of attacks, but how does it work? The paper under review today, Who Knocks at the IPv6 Door, explains backscatter usage in IPv4, and examines how effectively this technique might be used to detect scanning of IPv6 addresses, as well. Scanning the IPv6 address space is much more difficult because there are 2128 addresses rather than 232. The paper under review here is one of the first attempts to understand backscatter in the IPv6 address space, which can lead to a better understanding of the ways in which IPv6 scanners are optimizing their search through the larger address space, and also to begin understanding how backscatter can be used in IPv6 for many of the same purposes as it is in IPv4.

Kensuke Fukuda and John Heidemann. 2018. Who Knocks at the IPv6 Door?: Detecting IPv6 Scanning. In Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018 (IMC '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 231-237. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3278532.3278553