What we do
This host performs Internet-wide scans of a number of protocols on the public Internet as part of a joint research project between the University of Münster, Germay, and the Design and Analysis of Communication Systems department within the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Sciences at the University of Twente. We are a group of researchers who study the Internet to obtain insights on components, dependencies, and how network entities relate to each other. Our research is part of the national agenda of the Dutch Research Council (NWO). You can find more details about the motivation of our project here.
Which IP addresses do we scan?
We perform active scans on the entire routed IPv4 address space excluding the IANA IPv4 Special-Purpose Address Registry and IANA Multicast Address Space Registry.
How long will our scans last?
This is an ongoing effort, with project funding until at least 2026.
Personal data, GDPR, and ethics approval
All measurement data and all results of our analyses are stored securely in a locally operated data centre. We publish our results at a number of venues, where possible with attached data sets for reproducibility. For some recent results, please check out our publications site. We document our data management practices in a dedicated Data Management Plan, which we have deposited with our funding agency, the Dutch NWO. We have registered our data collection and processing with our institution's Data Protection Officer, together with a Data Protection Impact Assessment. The latter describes our processes to avoid collecting and processing personal data as much as possible. If you are interested in these documents, please contact us.
Our research effort has been approved by the responsible Ethics Committee at the University of Twente. Our ethics application describes how we minimize impact on other Internet entities and how we carry out our research in a responsible and ethical manner. We also describe the process we use if we accidentally identify vulnerable systems (responsible disclosure). Please contact us if you wish to know more about our ethics approval.
Opting out from our scans and complaints
If you do not want your site included in this research, you can of course opt out. Please use our contact form. We will then exclude the specified sites from our research. We have a dedicated process to react to all notifications and complaints in the shortest time span possible.
Questions
For further questions about the research, you can also contact us via our contact form.