When Parents and Children Disagree: Diving into DNS Delegation Inconsistency

Abstract

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical, decentralized, and distributed database. A key mechanism that enables the DNS to be hierarchical and distributed is delegation [7] of responsibility from parent to child zones—typically managed by different entities. RFC1034 [12] states that authoritative nameserver (NS) records at both parent and child should be “consistent and remain so”, but we find inconsistencies for over 13M second-level domains. We classify the type of inconsistencies we observe, and the behavior of resolvers in the face of such inconsistencies, using RIPE Atlas to probe our experimental domain configured for different scenarios. Our results underline the risk such inconsistencies pose to the availability of misconfigured domains.