Paper Info
Title
Impact of configuration errors on DNS robustness
Abstract
During the past twenty years the Domain Name System (DNS) has sustained phenomenal growth while maintaining satisfactory performance. However, the original design focused mainly on system robustness against physical failures, and neglected the impact of operational errors such as misconfigurations. Our recent measurement effort revealed three specific types of misconfigurations in DNS today: lame delegation, diminished server redundancy, and cyclic zone dependency. Zones with configuration errors suffer from reduced availability and increased query delays up to an order of magnitude. Furthermore, while the original DNS design assumed that redundant DNS servers fail independently, our measurements show that operational choices made at individual zones can severely affect the availability of other zones. We found that, left unchecked, DNS configuration errors are widespread, with lame delegation affecting 15% of the DNS zones, diminished server redundancy being even more prevalent, and cyclic dependency appearing in 2% of the zones. We also noted that the degrees of misconfiguration vary from zone to zone, with most popular zones having the lowest percentage of errors. Our results indicate that DNS, as well as any other truly robust large-scale system, must include systematic checking mechanisms to cope with operational errors.
Year
DOI
Venue
2004
10.1109/JSAC.2009.090404
Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Journal
Keywords
Field
DocType
reliability,dns,domain name system,resiliency
Computer science,Computer security,Domain Name System,Server,Computer network,Robustness (computer science),Redundancy (engineering),Delegation,Distributed computing
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
27
3
0733-8716
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
43
3.56
15
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Vasileios Pappas172436.00
Zhiguo Xu212412.06
Songwu Lu36137504.90
Daniel Massey440835.55
Andreas Terzis52449169.59
Lixia Zhang6117292506.06