16–17 Feb 2023 Workshop
Atlanta Marriott Marquis
US/Eastern timezone

Measuring TTL Violation of DNS Resolvers at scale

17 Feb 2023, 11:45
25m
Imperial Ballrom (Atlanta Marriott Marquis)

Imperial Ballrom

Atlanta Marriott Marquis

265 Peachtree Center Ave NE Atlanta GA 30303 United States
Remote Standard Presentation Main Session OARC 40 - Day 2

Speaker

Tijay Chung (Virginia Tech)

Description

The Domain Name System (DNS) provides a scalable name resolution service. It uses extensive caching to improve its resiliency and performance; every DNS record contains a time-to-live (TTL) value, which specifies how long a DNS record can be cached before being discarded. Since the TTL can play an important role in both DNS security (e.g., determining a DNSSEC-signed response’s caching period) and performance (e.g., the responsiveness of CDN-controlled domains), it is crucial to measure and understand how resolvers violate TTL. Unfortunately, measuring how DNS resolvers manage TTL at scale remains difficult since it usually requires the cooperation of many nodes spread across the globe. In this paper, we present a methodology that measures TTL-violating resolvers at scale using an HTTP/S proxy service called BrightData, which allows us to cover more than 27 K resolvers in 9.5 K ASes. Out of the 8,524 resolvers that we could measure through at least five different vantage points, we find that 8.74% of them extend the TTL arbitrarily, which potentially can degrade the performance of at least 38% of the popular websites that use CDNs. We also report that 43.1% of DNSSEC-validating resolvers incorrectly serve DNSSEC-signed responses from the cache even after their RRSIGs are expired.

Primary author

Tijay Chung (Virginia Tech)

Presentation materials