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Title: Assessing Support for DNS-over-TCP in the Wild
While the DNS protocol encompasses both UDP and TCP as its underlying transport, UDP is commonly used in practice. At the same time, increasingly large DNS responses and concerns over amplification denial of service attacks have heightened interest in conducting DNS interactions over TCP. This paper surveys the support for DNS-over-TCP in the deployed DNS infrastructure from several angles. First, we assess resolvers responsible for over 66.2% of the external DNS queries that arrive at a major content delivery network (CDN). We find that 2.7% to 4.8% of the resolvers, contributing around 1.1% to 4.4% of all queries arriving at the CDN from the resolvers we study, do not properly fallback to TCP when instructed by authoritative DNS servers. Should a content provider decide to employ TCP-fallback as the means of switching to DNS-over-TCP, it faces the corresponding loss of its customers. Second, we assess authoritative DNS servers (ADNS) for over 10M domains and many CDNs and find some ADNS, serving some popular websites and a number of CDNs, that do not support DNS-over-TCP. These ADNS would deny service to (RFC-compliant) resolvers that choose to switch to TCP-only interactions. Third, we study the TCP connection reuse behavior of DNS actors and describe a race condition in TCP connection reuse by DNS actors that may become a significant issue should DNS-over-TCP and other TCP-based DNS protocols, such as DNS-over-TLS, become widely used.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1647145
NSF-PAR ID:
10320040
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Editor(s):
Hohlfeld, O; Moura, G; Pelsser, C.
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Lecture notes in computer science
Volume:
13210
ISSN:
1611-3349
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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