Published October 27, 2020 | Version v1

Clouding up the Internet: how centralized is DNS traffic becoming?

  • 1. SIDN Labs
  • 2. InternetNZ
  • 3. USC/ISI
  • 4. SIDN Labs & University of Twente

Description

Concern has been mounting about Internet centralization over the few last years -- consolidation of traffic/users/infrastructure into the hands of a few market players. We measure DNS and computing centralization by analyzing DNS traffic collected at a DNS root server and two country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) -- one in Europe and the other in Oceania -- and show evidence of concentration. More than 30% of all queries to both ccTLDs are sent from 5 large cloud providers. We compare the clouds resolver infrastructure and highlight a discrepancy in behavior: some cloud providers heavily employ IPv6, DNSSEC, and DNS over TCP, while others simply use unsecured DNS over UDP over IPv4. We show one positive side to centralization: once a cloud provider deploys a security feature -- such as QNAME minimization -- it quickly benefits a large number of users.

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Additional details

Funding

European Commission
CONCORDIA - Cyber security cOmpeteNCe fOr Research anD InnovAtion 830927