A paged domain name system for query privacy

Abstract

The lack of privacy in DNS and DNSSEC is a problem that has only recently begun to see widespread attention by the Internet and research communities, and the solutions proposed so far only look at a narrow slice of the design space. In this paper we investigate a new approach for a privacy-preserving DNS mechanism that hides query information from root name servers and TLD registries. Our architecture lets TLD registries group the DNS records in their zones together into pages. Resolvers cache all pages locally, and retrieve only small incremental updates to optimize performance. We show that this strategy is particularly effective given the relatively static nature of TLD zone records. We analyze the privacy guarantees to assess the potential and limitations of our approach; we also evaluate the memory overhead for a resolver, and obtain feasibility guarantees through a prototype implementation of the new functionalities for resolvers and registries.