Explainable Rule Mining of IPv6 Extension-Header Presence Patterns from Paired-Vantage Captures

Abstract:IPv6 extension headers (EHs), such as fragmentation, segment routing, and in-situ telemetry, are operationally important yetwidely dropped in transit, and characterising their behaviour from packet captures is a recurring measurement problem. We ask whetheran explainable miner can recover human-readable rules of EH behaviour, and we contribute two reusable tools: a negative-control protocol that diagnoses whether a mined "temporal" network rule reflects genuine cross-packet dynamics or mere within-packetco-occurrence, and a sender-conditioned, per-family EH-retention measurement. Applying an interpretable temporal-logic rule miner to the JAMES paired-vantage dataset, we recover a portable Fragment-EH rule that the protocol reveals to be a within-packet,near-definitional co-occurrence rather than a temporal pattern, so the temporal-logic machinery does no work for this dominant rule;the retention measurement independently recovers the expected within-window ordering of EH observability. Our main result istherefore an honest, controlled negative finding, corroborated by executed decision-tree and large-language-model baselines: on theevaluated JAMES traces network-temporal structure does not carry the dominant Fragment-EH signal, and we supply the controls thatestablish when it would, validated on a synthetic positive control containing a genuine cross-packet dependency.

6 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables. Accepted at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Cyber Security and Resilience (IEEE CSR 2026)

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI)

arXiv:2610.08090 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2610.08090v1 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.08090 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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