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Am I correct in assuming that this becomes a total waste of $40m the moment people start finally transitioning to IPv6?

Eh, not really, it's just going to require an exponential increase in computing power. They already have the platform, in theory it would just be about scaling.

That said, it's kind of a huge scaling problem. If it really is a matter of throwing more hardware on it, and they currently use, say, 100 servers, they're going to need 429496729600 servers to get the same times they are getting now.

IPv6 is 2^96 times larger than IPv4. You'd need 100*2^96 servers. That's not tractable with a brute force method.

Maybe not that many, but still a lot more, if you first looked at BGP, and only brute-forced networks that were routable, rather than the entire search space.

Basically, before scanning, query and iterate all ASes advertisments and union present ranges, then feed that to zmap or something that can scan IPv4 and/or IPv6.

I dunno how I messed that up. I'mma blame the post-lunch slump. For some reason I was thinking IPv6 was 64 bits.

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