Tag: b-root

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new paper “Differences in Monitoring the DNS Root Over IPv4 and IPv6” to appear at the IEEE National Symposium for NSF REU Research in Data Science, Systems, and Security

Figure 9 from [Saluja22a], showing fraction of query failures in RIPE Atlas after we remove observers that are islands (unable to reach any of the 13 DNS root identifiers). Blue is IPv4, red is IPv6, with data for each of the 13 DNS root identifiers. We believe this data is a better representation of what people expect to see than Atlas results that include these "broken" observers.

On December 15, 2022, Tarang Saluja will present the paper “Differences in Monitoring the DNS Root Over IPv4 and IPv6” (by Tarang Saluja, John Heidemann, and Yuri Pradkin) at the IEEE National Symposium for NSF REU Research in Data Science, Systems, and Security.

From the abstract:

Figure 9 from [Saluja22a], showing fraction of query failures in RIPE Atlas after we remove observers that are islands (unable to reach any of the 13 DNS root identifiers). Blue is IPv4, red is IPv6, with data for each of the 13 DNS root identifiers. We believe this data is a better representation of what people expect to see than Atlas results that include these “broken” observers.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is an essential service for the Internet which maps host names to IP addresses. The DNS Root Sever System operates the top of this namespace. RIPE Atlas observes DNS from more than 11k vantage points (VPs) around the world, reporting the reliability of the DNS Root Server System in DNSmon. DNSmon shows that loss rates for queries to the DNS Root are nearly 10% for IPv6, much higher than the approximately 2% loss seen for IPv4. Although IPv6 is “new,” as an operational protocol available to a third of Internet users, it ought to be just as reliable as IPv4. We examine this difference at a finer granularity by investigating loss at individual VPs. We confirm that specific VPs are the source of this difference and identify two root causes: VP islands with routing problems at the edge which leave them unable to access IPv6 outside their LAN, and VP peninsulas which indicate routing problems in the core of the network. These problems account for most of the loss and nearly all of the difference between IPv4 and IPv6 query loss rates. Islands account for most of the loss (half of IPv4 failures and 5/6ths of IPv6 failures), and we suggest these measurement devices should be filtered out to get a more accurate picture of loss rates. Peninsulas account for the main differences between root identifiers, suggesting routing disagreements root operators need to address. We believe that filtering out both of these known problems provides a better measure of underlying network anomalies and loss and will result in more actionable alerts.

Original data from this paper is available from RIPE Atlas (measurement ids are in the paper). We are publishing new results daily on our website (from the RIPE data).

This work was done while Tarang was on his Summer 2022 undergraduate research internship at USC/ISI, with support from NSF grant 2051101 (PI: Jelena Mirkovich). John Heidemann and Yuri Pradkin’s work is supported by NSF through the EIEIO project (CNS-2007106). We thank Guillermo Baltra for his work on islands and peninsulas, as seen in his arXiv report.

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Outages Presentations Publications Uncategorized

new poster “Internet Outage Detection Using Passive Analysis” at ACM IMC 2022

Asma Enayet will present her poster “Internet Outage Detection Using Passive Analysis” by Asma Enayet and John Heidemann at ACM Internet Measurement Conference, Nice, France from October 25-27th, 2022.

We expect the ACM poster abstract (without the poster) to appear at https://doi.org/10.1145/3517745.3563032 in October 2022.

We are making a report available now with the poster abstract and poster at https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2209.13767 as a pre-print.

From the abstract:

Outages from natural disasters, political events, software or hardware issues, and human error place a huge cost on e-commerce ($66k per minute at Amazon). While several existing systems detect Internet outages, these systems are often too inflexible, with fixed parameters across the whole internet with CUSUM-like change detection. We instead propose a system using passive data, to cover both IPv4 and IPv6, customizing parameters for each block to optimize the performance of our Bayesian inference model. Our poster describes our three contributions: First, we show how customizing parameters allows us often to detect outages that are at both fine timescales (5 minutes) and fine spatial resolutions (/24 IPv4 and /48 IPv6 blocks). Our second contribution is to show that, by tuning parameters differently for different blocks, we can scale back temporal precision to cover more challenging blocks. Finally, we show our approach extends to IPv6 and provides the first reports of IPv6 outages.

IPv6 Coverage: our source of passive data (B-Root) is incomplete, but it provides similar coverage in both IPv4 and IPv6.
IPv6 Outages: Outage rate for IPv6 (12%) is greater than for IPv4 (5.5%) —IPv6 reliability can improve.

This work was supported by NSF grant CNS-2007106 (EIEIO).

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congratulations to Tarang Saluja for his summer undergraduate research internship

Tarang Saluja completed his summer undergraduate research internship at ISI this summer, working with John Heidemann and Yuri Pradkin on his project “Differences in Monitoring the DNS Root Over IPv4 and IPv6″.

In his project, Tarang examined RIPE Atlas’s DNSmon, a measurement system that monitors the Root Server System. DNSmon examines both IPv4 and IPv6, and its IPv6 reports show query loss rates that are consistently higher than IPv4, often 4-6% IPv6 loss vs. no or 2% IPv4 loss. Prior results by researchers at RIPE suggested these differences were due to problems at specific Atlas Vantage Points (VPs, also called Atlas Probes).

Tarang Saluja describing his research to an ISI researcher, at the ISI REU Poster Session on 2022-08-01.

Building on the Guillero Baltra’s studies of partial connectivity in the Internet, Tarang classified Atlas VPs with problems as islands and peninsulas. Islands think they are on IPv6, but cannot reach any of the 13 Root DNS “letters” over IPv6, indicating that the VP has a local network configuration problem. Peninsulas can reach some letters, but not others, indicating a routing problem somewhere in the core of the Internet.

Tarang’s work is important because these observations allow lead to potential solutions. Islands suggest VPs that do not support IPv6 and so should not be used for monitoring. Peninsulas point to IPv6 routing problems that need to be addressed by ISPs. Setting VPs with these problems aside provides a more accurate view of what IPv6 should be, and allows us to use DNSmon to detect more subtle problems. Together, his work points the way to improving IPv6 for everyone and improving Root DNS access over IPv6.

Tarang’s work was part of the ISI Research Experiences for Undergraduates program at USC/ISI. We thank Jelena Mirkovic (PI) for coordinating another year of this great program, and NSF for support through award #2051101.

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DNS Internet

APNIC Blog Post on the effects of chromium generated DNS traffic to the root server system

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.

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DNS Internet

B-root’s new sites reduce latency

B-Root, one of the 13 root DNS servers, deployed three new sites in January 2020, doubling its footprint and adding its first sites in Asia and Europe. How did this growth lower latency to users? We looked at B-Root deployment with Verfploter to answer this question. The end result was that new sites in Asia and Europe allowed users there to resolve DNS names with B-Root with lower latency (see the catchment map below). For more details please review our anycast catchment page.

B-root added 3 new sites in Singapore, Washington, DC, and Amsterdam to their three existing 3 sites in Los Angeles, Chile, and Miami. The graph below shows anycast catchments after these sites were deployed (each color in the pie charts shows traffic to a different site).

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Presentations

Talks at DNS-OARC 61

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.