Towards Better Internet Citizenship: Reducing the Footprint of   Internet-wide Scans by Topology Aware Prefix Selection
  Internet service discovery is an emerging topic to study the deployment of protocols. Towards this end, our community periodically scans the entire advertised IPv4 address space. In this paper, we question this principle. Being good Internet citizens means that we should limit scan traffic to what is necessary. We conducted a study of scan data, which shows that several prefixes do not accommodate any host of interest and the network topology is fairly stable. We argue that this allows us to collect representative data by scanning less. In our paper, we explore the idea to scan all prefixes once and then identify prefixes of interest for future scanning. Based on our analysis of the censys.io data set (4.1 TB data encompassing 28 full IPv4 scans within 6 months) we found that we can reduce scan traffic between 25-90% and miss only 1-10% of the hosts, depending on desired trade-offs and protocols. 
Johannes Klick, Stephan Lau, Matthias W\"ahlisch, Volker Roth
cs.NI