March 31, 2016 to April 1, 2016
Intercontinental Buenos Aires
America/Buenos_Aires timezone

Real-Time Analytics of DNS packets

Mar 31, 2016, 11:30 AM
30m
Montserrat (Intercontinental Buenos Aires)

Montserrat

Intercontinental Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Speaker

Dr Javier Bustos-Jiménez (NIC Chile Research Labs (NICLabs). Universidad de Chile)

Description

In OARC 22 (Amsterdam) we gave a lightning talk about the possibilities and prospects of using Apache Storm for real-time analytics of DNS packets. Now, after a year of work, we are glad to present RaTA-DNS, our modular system for realtime analytics. RaTA-DNS was designed as a set of self-contained modules aiming to an easy integration with existing systems such as DSC and Hedgehog, and new systems such as SIDN Lab's ENTRADA. The main components of our system are three: Fievel, a packet monitor responsible for capturing network traffic and perform a preliminary processing (for reducing the data rate in order to be transmitted to aggregators); Gopher, which is responsible for aggregate the captured data received from multiple servers (Gopher was developed in Go language instead using the Apache Storm framework for modularity reasons); and Remy, the dashboard (data visualisations), which is connected to several Gopher modules to provide real time displays. The idea is to provide a programmable framework for real-time monitoring of DNS. Thus, Fievel has been developed as a scriptable module, where preprocessing is programmable and adaptable to the needs of different users, producing a monitoring system fully customisable. Additionally, as Fievel provides the tcp-replay function and Remy the play-pause-rewind functions, RaTA-DNS can be also seen as a very useful tool for forensic analysis of DNS traces. Actually, RaTA-DNS is connected to 2 NIC Chile DNS servers, processing in a normal operations day around 1200 (queries-responses)/sec per server, and aggregating statistical information such as queries/sec, non-rfc-conformant queries (queries using underscores), top-K queries by source, destiny, and geolocation. Further information can be seen in http://ratadns.niclabs.cl

Primary author

Dr Javier Bustos-Jiménez (NIC Chile Research Labs (NICLabs). Universidad de Chile)

Co-author

Mr Francisco Cifuentes (NIC Chile Research Labs)

Presentation materials