from the we-dont-say-botnet-anymore-its-just-iot dept.
Ben Cox writes in his blog about visualizing IPv4 address space use by mapping the whole IPv4 Internet with Hilbert curves. While the IPv4 address space is quite large it is still small enough to be able to send a packet to each and every IP address. He goes a little into the background of the maths involved and then makes a comparison to the IPv4 address space back in 2012 using data from the Carna botnet.
[See, also: xkcd's MAP of the INTERNET, the IPv4 space, 2006. --martyb]
Earlier on SN: Vint Cerf's Dream Do-Over: 2 Ways He'd Make the Internet Different
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Vint Cerf is considered a father of the internet, but that doesn't mean there aren't things he would do differently if given a fresh chance to create it all over again.
"If I could have justified it, putting in a 128-bit address space would have been nice so we wouldn't have to go through this painful, 20-year process of going from IPv4 to IPv6," Cerf told an audience of journalists Thursday during a press conference at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany.
IPv4, the first publicly used version of the Internet Protocol, included an addressing system that used 32-bit numerical identifiers. It soon became apparent that it would lead to an exhaustion of addresses, however, spurring the creation of IPv6 as a replacement. Roughly a year ago, North America officially ran out of new addresses based on IPv4.
For security, public key cryptography is another thing Cerf would like to have added, had it been feasible.
Trouble is, neither idea is likely to have made it into the final result at the time. "I doubt I could have gotten away with either one," said Cerf, who won a Turing Award in 2004 and is now vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google. "So today we have to retrofit."
With all the noise about default passwords on Internet-connected devices, it is maybe time to revisit a 2012 paper on the Carna botnet. There were probably other even quieter ones before that and certainly default passwords have been long exploited. The Carna botnet operator went to the trouble of publishing a paper four years ago. He or she was playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) and discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many allowed login with empty or default credentials and were thus used to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses to form a kind of census of the IPv4 Internet. The scanned data is in the public domain and available for download and analysis over Bittorrent.
IPv6 is another can of worms and the IPv4 data is thus of historical interest.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @03:57PM (6 children)
This is very interesting, much more technical, more detailed, and generally better in all ways except understand-ability.
I do want to note, though... mandatory XKCD [xkcd.com].
To be clear there is a great deal of credit to be had in this analysis and work. I'm not thrilled with how the author claims (and probably indeed did) have the personal revelation of Hilbert curves.
Great job to the author, but credit where it is due as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @04:32PM
It's therefore Dilbert Curves, or PHB curves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Monday April 23 2018, @06:59PM
So you accept he probably did come up with it by himself, but you're not happy that he's claiming that he did so? He might be completely unaware of the XKCD version.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Monday April 23 2018, @07:01PM (2 children)
Interesting, but is it accurate? A lot of space in there probably doesn't respond to pings by design, and there is a huge topology above this map representing NAT'd servers that only connect through a single point on this map.
I do have to give him points for humor though. The IPv6 map is pretty funny.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Monday April 23 2018, @09:06PM
Yeah, I imagine the UK MOD block is a bit busier than indicated, even if they're not really using it.
But then, I'm not sure you want to be running a full nmap of all 65536 ports against the MOD or the US Army blocks, especially not if you have to sit around someplace and wait for it to complete.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday April 23 2018, @10:58PM
$ sudo ping -f -c 1000 nsa.gov
It answered at first but after a hundred or so responses I got "host unreachable" messages.
Now they don't answer pings at all.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MostCynical on Monday April 23 2018, @10:48PM
In high school, they teach sin, cos and tan, and a few fromulae to apply.
Then you get to university and learn how to map areas under curves in imaginary space, and derive everything from first principles..
This guy learns about Hilbert curves, gets excited and graphs his results.
He even says it has been done before, just not recently.
Is the bit you're not thrilled about his admission of his "discovery"? He learned something, and shared his new knowledge.
I'm a cynic - you just seem to be grumpy.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday April 23 2018, @10:55PM
They claim that you'll get lots of Google Juice if your server has a Class C IP.
stuff like that is why we ran out of addresses.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]