Authoritative server's impact on domain name system's performance and security

Abstract

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the most crucial infrastructure for mapping human-readable host names to the corresponding IP addresses and providing the routing information of Email. Comparing with the top-level domains (TLD) such as the root servers, the local authoritative servers are more vulnerable to device failures and malicious attacks. This paper described the existence condition of authoritative servers and presented a novel domain measurement tool named DNSAuth to collect the information of local authoritative servers automatically. Experiments to the real-life authoritative servers were conducted which highlighting three important aspects: the distribution, the geographic location and their impacts on performance and security. According to five representative attributes, the authoritative servers of China Top100 websites are evaluated and the result shows that only 32% of all the servers act preferably in performance and security. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.