A Nameserver Importance Ranking Method Based on Heterogeneous Information Network

Abstract

As the Internet continues to evolve, the Domain Name System (DNS), which is originally designated as distributed service, starts to aggregate to fewer DNS servers. Thus, it is of great significance to dig out these name servers and carry out specific security protection on them. Researchers try to calculate the importance of an individual name server based on the number of domains resolved by it. However, we argue that semantic information such as the structure of a name server can also contribute to its importance. In this paper, we present a novel ranking method based on heterogeneous information networks, which not only considers the number of zones affected by the nameserver but also takes the importance of the zone and the influence of its adjacent name servers into consideration. We collect the name servers of the Alexa Top 1000 domains and calculate their importance. Results show that our method is more accurate compared to the existing method.