SGER: Explorative Study: Design for Resiliency

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The SGER proposal "Explorative Study: Design for Resiliency" describes design and analysis work targeted to the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS). DNS is a core underpinning service and protocol enabling name-to-address mappings for the Internet. Previous work in the community combined with recent measurements and analysis by the author reveal a number of weaknesses in DNS as it is deployed and configured by authoritative zones. These weaknesses stem from both an original design that considered only physical errors in the infrastructure, and a set of inefficiencies and breakage resulting directly from misconfiguration and human error. This study will explore a re-design of DNS based on principles of resiliency in the protocol. The new design will be analyzed comparatively to today's existing system and known vulnerabilities will be applied in the assessment. An amendment to the SGER proposal applies recent DNS measurement and analysis to the addition of several DNS-specific tools that provide automated checking for DNS configuration problems through active measurement, zone file checks and DNS protocol enhancement.