# Predicting IPv4 Services Across All Ports

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.00895 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00895/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Metadata Embeddings for User and Item Cold-start Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.08439/) (2015)
- [Entropy/IP: Uncovering Structure in IPv6 Addresses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04327/) (2016)
- [Clusters in the Expanse: Understanding and Unbiasing IPv6 Hitlists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01633/) (2018)
- [LZR: Identifying Unexpected Internet Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04841/) (2023)
- [Yarrp'ing the Internet: Randomized High-Speed Active Topology Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.03999/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Internet-wide scanning is commonly used to understand the topology and security of the Internet. However, IPv4 Internet scans have been limited to scanning only a subset of services -- exhaustively scanning all IPv4 services is too costly and no existing bandwidth-saving frameworks are designed to scan IPv4 addresses across all ports. In this work we introduce GPS, a system that efficiently discovers Internet services across all ports. GPS runs a predictive framework that learns from extremely small sample sizes and is highly parallelizable, allowing it to quickly find patterns between services across all 65K ports and a myriad of features. GPS computes service predictions in 13 minutes (four orders of magnitude faster than prior work) and finds 92.5% of services across all ports with 131x less bandwidth, and 204x more precision, compared to exhaustive scanning. GPS is the first work to show that, given at least two responsive IP addresses on a port to train from, predicting the majority of services across all ports is possible and practical.