John Heidemann / Papers / Recursives in the Wild: Engineering Authoritative DNS Servers

Recursives in the Wild: Engineering Authoritative DNS Servers
Moritz Müller, Giovane C
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Citation

Moritz Müller, Giovane C. M. Moura, Ricardo de O. Schmidt and John Heidemann. Recursives in the Wild: Engineering Authoritative DNS Servers. Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (London, UK, 2017), 489–495. [DOI] [PDF] [alt PDF] [Dataset]

Abstract

In Internet Domain Name System (DNS), services operate authoritative name servers that individuals query through recursive resolvers. Operators strive to provide reliability by operating multiple name servers (NS), each on a separate IP address, and by using IP anycast to allow NSes to provide service from many physical locations. To meet their goals of minimizing latency and balancing load across NSes and anycast, operators need to know how recursive resolvers select an NS, and how that interacts with their NS deployments. Prior work has shown some recursives search for low latency, while others pick an NS at random or round robin, but did not examine how prevalent each choice was. This paper provides the first analysis of how recursives select between name servers in the wild, and from that we provide guidance to operators how to engineer their name servers to reach their goals. We conclude that all NSes need to be equally strong and therefore we recommend to deploy IP anycast at every single authoritative.

Bibtex Citation

@inproceedings{Mueller17b,
  author = {M\"{u}ller, Moritz and Moura, Giovane C. M. and de O. Schmidt, Ricardo and Heidemann, John},
  title = {Recursives in the Wild: Engineering Authoritative {DNS} Servers},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference},
  pages = {489--495},
  year = {2017},
  sortdate = {2017-11-01},
  project = {ant, retrofuturebridge, lacrend, predict, nipet},
  jsubject = {traffic_detection},
  address = {London, UK},
  myorganization = {USC/Information Sciences Institute},
  copyrightholder = {ACM},
  copyrightterms = {
  Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work
  for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that
  copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage
  and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first
  page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to
  redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a
  fee.
  },
  jlocation = {johnh: pafile},
  keywords = {anycast, recursive DNS, authoritative selection},
  url = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Mueller17b.html},
  pdfurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Mueller17b.pdf},
  blogurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/blog/?p=1083},
  dataseturl = {https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/dns/index.html#recursives},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3131365.3131366}
}

Copyright

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
Copyright © by John Heidemann