Clouding up the Internet: How Centralized is DNS Traffic Becoming?

Moura, Giovane C. M. and Castro, Sebastian and Hardaker, Wes and Wullink, Maarten and Hesselman, Cristian

citation

Giovane C. M. Moura, Sebastian Castro, Wes Hardaker, Maarten Wullink and Cristian Hesselman 2020. Clouding up the Internet: How Centralized is DNS Traffic Becoming? Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (New York, NY, USA, 2020), 42–49. [DOI]

abstract

Concern has been mounting about Internet centralization over the few last years – consolidation of traffic/users/infrastructure into the hands of a few market players. We measure DNS and computing centralization by analyzing DNS traffic collected at a DNS root server and two country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) – one in Europe and the other in Oceania – and show evidence of concentration. More than 30% of all queries to both ccTLDs are sent from 5 large cloud providers. We compare the clouds resolver infrastructure and highlight a discrepancy in behavior: some cloud providers heavily employ IPv6, DNSSEC, and DNS over TCP, while others simply use unsecured DNS over UDP over IPv4. We show one positive side to centralization: once a cloud provider deploys a security feature – such as QNAME minimization – it quickly benefits a large number of users.

reference

@inproceedings{Moura20b,
  author = {Moura, Giovane C. M. and Castro, Sebastian and Hardaker, Wes and Wullink, Maarten and Hesselman, Cristian},
  title = {Clouding up the Internet: How Centralized is DNS Traffic Becoming?},
  year = {2020},
  sortdate = {2020-10-27},
  isbn = {9781450381383},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3419394.3423625},
  doi = {10.1145/3419394.3423625},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference},
  pages = {42–49},
  numpages = {8},
  jlocation = {Virtual Event, USA},
  series = {IMC '20},
  project = {ant}
}