Towards Automated Measurements of Internet's Naming Infrastructure

Abstract

Measuring and evaluating the Internet infrastructure is an important research area, with numerous proposals for sophisticated and novel ways to model traffic, infer networks' architectures and topology, or detect misconfigurations. An important requirement for such studies is the ability to reproduce the measurements in order to trace changes in the Internet over time, or to validate the reported results. Reproducibility is critical, for example, studying trends in configurations of services, adoption of patches and best practices, or fixes of misconfigurations. In this work we design automated tools for study of the architectures and configurations of the name servers in Domain Name System (DNS) and for evaluation of interoperability of unsigned domains with DNSSEC. Our measurement tools utilize wide-scale measurements of DNS servers in the forward and the reverse DNS trees, and conduct automated measurements, and provide reports with statistics. The tools are easy to use, with a convenient interface for clients and network operators. We provide access to the results collected with our tool, via a website.