The DNS ecosystem today is revisiting basic design questions: should it encourage TCP? TLS? DTLS? Something completely new like QUIC or HTTP? While modeling and analysis help answer some of these questions, experimental evaluation is necessary for validation, and in some cases the only way to get accurate estimates of software memory use and performance. This talk will discuss our recent work in supporting experimental evaluation of DNS with components that support trace replay and evaluation. Trace replay is supported by a DNS data archive to prime replay with real data, and a query mutation system to support what-if evaluation using variations of that data.
The trace replay system is the work with Liang Zhu; this work is part of a larger system to support DNS experimentation, joint work with Wes Hardaker.
We have been collecting data about outages in the Internet since Oct. 2014. Our outage detection system, Trinocular, uses active probing from four sites to study about 4 million /24 IPv4 address blocks. Long-duration measurements bring challenges that don’t occur in short observations. Most importantly, our target (“the Internet”) changes as we measure it, as new blocks come on-line, old blocks are reused in different ways, and ISPs observe and sometimes block our traffic. Our measurement platform also sees occasional hardware failures. Visualization can assist detection of these problems, allowing human perception to detect changes in data collection that have not previously been anticipated. This talk will discuss the challenges of long-term outage measurement and describe our new algorithm that scales to support clustering of 4M blocks and 3 months of observations for visualization.
Our visualization is joint work with Yuri Pradkin, and analysis of our long-term outages includes work with Abdulla Alwabel.
John Heidemann gave the talk “DNS Privacy, Service Management, and Research: Friends or Foes” at the NDSS DNS Privacy Workshop in San Diego, California, USA on Feburary 26, 2017. Slides are available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann17a.pdf.
The talk does not have a formal abstract, but to summarize:
This invited talk is part of a panel on the tension between DNS privacy and service management. In the talk I expand on that topic and discuss
the tension between DNS privacy, service management, and research.
I give suggestions about how service management and research can adapt to proceed while still providing basic privacy.