Authority server selection in DNS caching resolvers

Yu, Yang; Wessels, Duane; Larson, Matt; Zhang, Lixia

doi:10.1145/2185376.2185387

Cited by 42 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…The median number of name servers configured per DNS zone on that name server, however, is 4.0, which means that not all queries from Google for domains hosted on that name server will be sent to that particular name server. Typical resolver implementations will distribute queries over all authoritative name servers for a domain, usually favoring servers with shorter RTTs [14].…”

Section: Distribution Of Queries Over Authoritative Name Serversmentioning

confidence: 99%

Passive Observations of a Large DNS Service: 2.5 Years in the Life of Google

Vries

Rijswijk-Deij

Boer

et al. 2020

IEEE Trans. Netw. Serv. Manage.

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In 2009 Google launched its Public DNS service, with its characteristic IP address 8.8.8.8. Since then, this service has grown to be the largest and most well-known DNS service in existence. The popularity of public DNS services has been disruptive for Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). CDNs rely on IP information to geo-locate clients. This no longer works in the presence of public resolvers, which led to the introduction of the EDNS0 Client Subnet extension. ECS allows resolvers to reveal part of a client's IP address to authoritative name servers and helps CDNs pinpoint client origin. A useful side effect of ECS is that it can be used to study the workings of public DNS resolvers. In this paper, we leverage this side effect of ECS to study Google Public DNS. From a dataset of 3.7 billion DNS queries spanning 2.5 years, we extract ECS information and perform a longitudinal analysis of which clients are served from which Point-of-Presence. Our study focuses on two aspects of GPDNS. First, we show that while GPDNS has PoPs in many countries, traffic is frequently routed out of country, even if that was not necessary. Often this reduces performance, and perhaps more importantly, exposes DNS requests to state-level surveillance. Second, we study how GPDNS is used by clients. We show that end-users switch to GPDNS en masse when their ISP's DNS service is unresponsive, and do not switch back. We also find that many e-mail providers configure GPDNS as the resolver for their servers. This raises serious privacy concerns, as DNS queries from mail servers reveal information about hosts they exchange mail with. Because of GPDNS's use of ECS, this sensitive information is not only revealed to Google, but also to any operator of an authoritative name server that receives ECS-enabled queries from GPDNS during the lookup process.

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Section: Distribution Of Queries Over Authoritative Name Serversmentioning

confidence: 99%

Passive Observations of a Large DNS Service: 2.5 Years in the Life of Google

Vries

Rijswijk-Deij

Boer

et al. 2020

IEEE Trans. Netw. Serv. Manage.

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“…Since, the domain name resolution procedure can be considered as a node traversal problem, an optimal choice of the appropriate nodes can significantly improve the performance. Thus, the impact of the DNS server selection algorithms of popular DNS proxy server implementations is provided by the work [11].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

DNS as Resolution Infrastructure for Persistent Identifiers

Berber

Yahyapour

2017

Proceedings of the 2017 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems

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Abstract-The concept of persistent identification is increasingly important for research data management. At the beginnings it was only considered as a persistent naming mechanism for research datasets, which is achieved by providing an abstraction for addresses of research datasets. However, recent developments in research data management have led persistent identification to move towards a concept which realizes a virtual global research data network. The base for this is the ability of persistent identifiers of holding semantic information about the identified dataset itself. Hence, community-specific representations of research datasets are mapped into globally common data structures provided by persistent identifiers. This ultimately enables a standardized data exchange between diverse scientific fields.Therefore, for the immense amount of research datasets, a robust and performant global resolution system is essential. However, for persistent identifiers the number of resolution systems is in comparison to the count of DNS resolvers extremely small. For the Handle System for instance, which is the most established persistent identifier system, there are currently only five globally distributed resolvers available.The fundamental idea of this work is therefore to enable persistent identifier resolution over DNS traffic. On the one side, this leads to a faster resolution of persistent identifiers. On the other side, this approach transforms the DNS system to a data dissemination system.

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“…Yu et al [14] found that various versions of DNS resolvers (notably BIND and PowerDNS) adjust the rate at which they query different root servers based on RTTs, sometimes in nonintuitive ways. BIND 9.7, for instance, preferentially queries root servers with greater RTTs.…”

Section: Likely Cause: Non-uniform Server Selection Algorithmsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…PowerDNS, which is popular in Europe, on the other hand, exhibits a "spike distribution," causing it to almost exclusively contact the single lowest-RTT server [14]. Figure 6 shows the geographic distribution of servers whose query volumes increased by at least 100×; 62% of these servers are located in Europe, 20% in North America, 10% in Asia, 7% in Oceania, and the rest in South America and Africa.…”

Section: Likely Cause: Non-uniform Server Selection Algorithmsmentioning

confidence: 99%

D-mystifying the D-root address change

Lentz

Levin

Castonguay

et al. 2013

Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference

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On January 3, 2013, the D-root DNS server hosted at the University of Maryland changed IP address. To avoid service disruption, the old address continues to answer queries. In this paper, we perform an initial investigation of the traffic at both the new and old addresses before, during, and since the flag day. The data we collected show non-obvious behavior: the overall query volume to the D-roots increases by roughly 50%, the old address continues to receive a high volume of queries months after the changeover, and far more queries to the old address succeed than those to the new one. Our analysis provides a window into how compliant resolvers change over and how non-standard and seemingly malicious resolvers react (or not) to the IP address change. We provide evidence that a relatively small number of implementation errors account for nearly all discrepancies that are not misconfigurations or attacks.

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Authority server selection in DNS caching resolvers

Cited by 42 publications

References 15 publications

Passive Observations of a Large DNS Service: 2.5 Years in the Life of Google

Passive Observations of a Large DNS Service: 2.5 Years in the Life of Google

DNS as Resolution Infrastructure for Persistent Identifiers

D-mystifying the D-root address change

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