The Domain Name System (DNS) is responsible for handling the initial steps of almost all connections on the Internet. USC/ISI’s Wes Hardaker, along with Geoff Houston and Joao Damas from APNIC, gave a “Deep Dive” presentation on how the DNS works at the 108th IETF conference. The recording is available on YouTube for those that missed it.
During the summer of 2019, Haoyu Jiang and Wes Hardaker studied the effects of DNS traffic sent to the root serevr system by chromium-based web browsers. The results of this short research effort were posted to the APNIC blog.
Mozilla announced the creation of a “use-application-dns.net” “Canary Domain” that could be configured within ISPs to disable Firefox’s default use of DNS over HTTPS. On 2019/09/21 Wes Hardaker created a RIPE Atlas measurement to study resolvers within ISPs that had been configured to return an NXDOMAIN response. This measurement is configured to have 1000 Atlas probes query for the use-application-dns.net name once a day.
The full description of methodology is on Wes’ ISI site, which should receive regular updates to the graph.
Wes Hardaker gave two presentations at DNS-OARC on November 1st, 2019. The first was a presentation about the previously announced “Cache me if you can” paper, which is on youtube, and the slides are available as well. The second talk presented Haoyu Jiang’s work during the summer of 2018 on analyzing DNS B-Root traffic during the 2018 DITL data for levels of traffic sent by the Chrome web browser, levels of traffic associated with different languages, and levels of traffic sent by different label lengths. It is available on youtube with the slides here.
Wes Hardaker gave a talk on his LocalRoot project, allowing recursive resolver operators to keep an up to date cached copy of the root zone data available at all times. The talk was held in Abu Dhabi on November 1, 2017 at the ICANN annual general meeting during the DNSSEC Workshop. Slides and recorded video are available at on the ICANN event page.
Wes Hardaker gave the talk “Verfploeter: Broad and Load-Aware Anycast Mapping” at DNS-OARC in San Jose, California, USA on September 29, 2017. Slides are available at on the event page.
From the abstract:
IP anycast provides DNS operators and CDNs with automatic fail-over and reduced latency by breaking the Internet into catchments,each served by a different anycast site. Unfortunately, understanding and predicting changes to catchments as sites are added or removed has been challenging. Current tools such as RIPE Atlas or commercial equivalents map from thousands of vantage points (VPs),but their coverage can be inconsistent around the globe. This paper proposes Verfploeter, a new method that maps anycast catchments using active probing. Verfploeter provides around 3.8M virtual VPs, 430 times the 9k physical VPs in RIPE Atlas,providing coverage of the vast majority of networks around the globe. We then add load information from prior service logs to provide calibrated predictions of anycast changes. Verfploeter has been used to evaluate the new anycast for B-Root, and we also report its use of a nine-site anycast testbed. We show that the greater coverage made possible by Verfploeter’s active probing is necessary to see routing differences in regions that have sparse coverage from RIPE Atlas, like South America and China.
A video of the talk is available On YouTube.