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This Texas A&M research project investigates non-intrusive methods for discovering open services in the Internet and characterizes their availability on large-scale. During active periods of testing, our server issues TCP, UDP, or ICMP requests to seemingly random IP addresses and sporadically interacts with certain found hosts after the test is over. Only one protocol is tested during any phase of the project.

• How can my domain or network be removed from the test?

Please contact Derek Leonard with your subnet or hostname information. 

• Where do you send packets from and what is the probing rate?

Hosts internet-crawlerNN.irl.cs.tamu.edu (where NN is an integer) residing in subnet 128.194.135/24 examine in random order non-overlapping subsets of the IP space advertised in BGP. The probing rate of individual networks depends on their size and the duration of the test (usually 24-48 hours). 

• Can the project crash or compromise my domain?

Not to our knowledge. All requests are compliant with protocol specifications and do not aim to exploit any vulnerabilities.

• What are you planning to do with the obtained data?

We respect the privacy of target networks. Individual IPs obtained during our scan will not be released outside the lab and may be reported only in statistical summaries.

• Has anyone done this before?

Yes. Internet scanning for research purposes is fairly common in the field. See for example the following: DNS, HTTP, and ICMP scans.