LDplayer: DNS Experimentation at Scale (poster abstract)

Zhu, Liang and Heidemann, John
USC/Information Sciences Institute

citation

Liang Zhu and John Heidemann 2017. LDplayer: DNS Experimentation at Scale (poster abstract). Proceedings of the SIGCOMM Posters and Demos (Aug. 2017), 60–62. [DOI] [PDF] [Software]

abstract

In the last 20 years the core of the Domain Name System (DNS) has improved in security and privacy, and DNS use broadened from name-to-address mapping to a critical roles in service discovery and anti-spam. However, protocol evolution and expansion of use has been slow because advances must consider a huge and diverse installed base. We suggest that experimentation at scale can fill this gap. To meet the need for experimentation at scale, this paper presents LDplayer, a configurable, general-purpose DNS testbed. LDplayer enables DNS experiments to scale in several dimensions: many zones, multiple levels of DNS hierarchy, high query rates, and diverse query sources. To meet these requirements while providing high fidelity experiments, LDplayer includes a distributed DNS query replay system and methods to rebuild the relevant DNS hierarchy from traces. We show that a single DNS server can correctly emulate multiple independent levels of the DNS hierarchy while providing correct responses as if they were independent. We show the importance of our system to evaluate pressing DNS design questions, using it to evaluate changes in DNSSEC key size.

reference

@inproceedings{Zhu17b,
  author = {Zhu, Liang and Heidemann, John},
  title = {LDplayer: DNS Experimentation at Scale (poster abstract)},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the SIGCOMM Posters and Demos},
  series = {SIGCOMM Posters and Demos '17},
  year = {2017},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-5057-0},
  jlocation = {johnh: pafile},
  pages = {60--62},
  numpages = {3},
  acmid = {3131986},
  publisher = {ACM},
  keywords = {Domain Name System (DNS), experiments, performance, trace replay},
  month = aug,
  sortdate = {2017-08-22},
  project = {ant, retrofuture, lacrend},
  jsubject = {dns},
  url = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Zhu17b.html},
  pdfurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Zhu17b.pdf},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3123878.3131986},
  acmdoi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3123878.3131986},
  softwareurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/software/ldplayer/index.html},
  myorganization = {USC/Information Sciences Institute},
  copyrightholder = {authors}
}