Publication: Measuring the global recursive DNS infrastructure: a view from the edge
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2019-10-29
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Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
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Abstract
The Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the most critical Internet subsystems. While the
majority of ISPs deploy and operate their own DNS infrastructure, many end users resort to third-party DNS
providers with hopes of enhancing their privacy, security, and web performance. However, bad user choices
and the uneven geographical deployment of DNS providers could render insecure and inef cient DNS
con gurations for millions of users. In this paper, we propose a novel and exible measurement method to
(1) study the infrastructure of recursive DNS resolvers, including both ISP's and third-party DNS providers'
deployment strategies; and (2) study end-user DNS choices, both in a timely manner and at a global scale. For
that, we leverage the outreach capacity of online advertising networks to distribute lightweight JavaScriptbased
DNS measurement scripts. To showcase the potential of our technique, we launch two separate ad
campaigns that triggered more than 3M DNS lookups, which allow us to identify and study more than
76k recursive DNS resolvers giving support to more than 25k eyeball ASes in 178 countries. The analysis
of the data offers new insights into the DNS infrastructure, such as user preferences towards third-party
DNS providers (namely, Google, OpenDNS, Level3, and Cloud are recursive DNS resolvers account for
~13% of the total DNS requests triggered by our campaigns), and into deployment decisions of many ISPs
providing both mobile and xed access networks to separate the DNS infrastructure serving each type of
access technology.
Description
Keywords
Internet measurements, DNS, Online advertisements
Bibliographic citation
Callejo, P., Cuevas, R., Vallina-Rodriguez, N., & Cuevas Rumin, A. (2019). Measuring the Global Recursive DNS Infrastructure: A View From the Edge. IEEE Access, 7, pp. 168020-168028.