: Measuring Centralization of DNS Infrastructure in the Wild

Zembruzki, Luciano; Jacobs, Arthur Selle; Landtreter, Gustavo Spier; Granville, Lisandro Zambenedetti; Moura, Giovane C. M.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-44041-1_76

Cited by 11 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Our work is motivated by recent reports about consolidation trends in the Internet [9,16,21,28,36] and their economic, political and reliability implications [7,10,11,18,19,26,36]. The 2019 Global Internet Report [7] provides an overview of these trends in every aspect of the Internet economy, from access provision to service infrastructure to applications.…”

Section: Background and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In recent years there has been a move towards Internet centralization and recent work have begun to analyze this in the context of DNS [9,36], cloud providers [28], and the Web in general [21]. Most recent work has concentrated particularly on DNS centralization.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These cloud providers (CPs) include Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Cloudflare and Amazon. Zembruzki et al [36] introduce a methodology and a tool, dnstracker, that allows measurements of the degree of concentration and shared DNS infrastructure by using active DNS measurements. Kashaf et al [21] measures the degree of direct and indirect third party dependence of top Global 100k Alexa websites on DNS, CA and CDN infrastructure.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is a growing concern about consolidation trends in the Internet -the concentration of traffic, infrastructure, services and users on a handful of providers -given its economic, political and reliability implications [7,10,18,19]. Recent work has started to analyze these trends in the context of DNS [9,36], cloud providers [28] and the Web in general [21].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Third-party Service Dependencies and Centralization Around the World

Kumar¹,

Asif²,

Lee³

et al. 2021

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There is a growing concern about consolidation trends in Internet services, with, for instance, a large fraction of popular websites depending on a handful of third-party service providers. In this paper, we report on a large-scale study of third-party dependencies around the world, using vantage points from 50 countries, from all inhabited continents, and regional top-500 popular websites. This broad perspective shows that dependencies vary widely around the world. We find that between 15% and as much as 80% of websites, across all countries, depend on a DNS, CDN or CA thirdparty provider. Sites' critical dependencies, while lower, are equally spread ranging from 9% and 61% (CDN and DNS in China, respectively). Despite this high variability, our results suggest a highly concentrated market of third-party providers: three third-party providers across all countries serve an average of 91.2% and Google, by itself, serves an average of 72% of the surveyed websites. We explore various factors that may help explain the differences and similarities in degrees of third-party dependency across countries, including economic conditions, Internet development, language, and economic trading partners.

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Section: Background and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Third-party Service Dependencies and Centralization Around the World

Kumar¹,

Asif²,

Lee³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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“…Previous work has studied both the extent and effects of increased DNS centralization. Zembruzki et al [30] found that up to 12,000 name servers used by websites in the Alexa top 1 million shared the same third-party infrastructure. As for public resolvers, Radu et al [27] found that the popularity of Google's public DNS resolver has increased tremendously over time, serving as the default resovler for over 35% of studied clients.…”

Section: The Domain Name System (Dns)mentioning

confidence: 99%

A First Look at the Consolidation of DNS and Web Hosting Providers

Wang¹,

MacMillan²,

Schaffner³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Although the Internet continues to grow, it increasingly depends on a small set of dominant service providers for Domain Name System (DNS) hosting and web hosting providers. This consolidation of Internet resources poses a variety of potential threats to the Internet, including susceptibility to outages, failures, and even overt censorship from platforms. Increasingly, an outage from a single organization can create widespread disruption across a large number of sites and services. Consolidation trends have been noted for several years, yet these trends have not been quantified. Towards this end, this paper aims to quantify these trends, in particular, the reliance of the most popular domains on a small set of organizations for DNS and web hosting. We highlight the extent to which the hosting of authoritative name servers and web hosting for the top 10,000 websites are consolidated on relatively few platforms. The statistics are surprising and somewhat alarming. We find that over 75% of the top 10,000 domains rely on only a single organization for hosting authoritative DNS resolution. Furthermore, two organizations, Cloudflare and Amazon, are the sole host of DNS name servers for over 40% of these popular domains.

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