Research

IP address classification and clustering are important tools for security practitioners in understanding attacks and employing proactive defenses. Over the past decade, network providers have begun transitioning from IPv4 to the more flexible IPv6, and a third of users now access online services over IPv6. However, there is no reason to believe that the properties of IPv4 addresses used for security applications should carry over to IPv6, and to date there has not yet been a large-scale study comparing the two protocols at a user (as opposed to a client or address) level.

In this paper we establish empirical grounding on how both ordinary users and attackers use IPv6 in practice, compared with IPv4. Using data on benign and abusive accounts at a large online platform, we conduct user-centric analyses that assess the spatial and temporal properties of users’ IP addresses, and IP-centric evaluations that characterize the user populations on IP addresses. We find that compared with IPv4, IPv6 addresses are less populated with users and shorter lived for each user. While both protocols exhibit outlying behavior, we determine that IPv6 outliers are significantly less prevalent and diverse, and more readily predicted. We also study the effects of subnetting IPv6 addresses at different prefix lengths, and find that while /56 subnets are closest in behavior to IPv4 addresses for malicious users, either the full IPv6 address or /64 subnets are most suitable for IP-based security applications, with both providing better performance tradeoffs than IPv4 addresses. Ultimately, our findings provide guidance on how security practitioners can handle IPv6 for applications such as blocklisting, rate limiting, and training machine learning models.