A light-weighted data collection method for DNS simulation on the cyber range

Abstract

The method of DNS data collection is one of the most important parts of DNS simulation. DNS data contains a lot of information. When it comes to analyzing the DNS security issues by simulation on the cyber range with customized features, we only need some of them, such as IP address, domain name information, etc. Therefore, the data we need are supposed to be light-weighted and easy to manipulate. Many researchers have designed different schemes to obtain their datasets, such as LDplayer and Thales system. However, existing solutions consume excessive computational resources, which are not necessary for DNS security simulation. In this paper, we propose a light-weighted active data collection method to prepare the datasets for DNS simulation on cyber range. We evaluate the performance of the method and prove that it can collect DNS data in a short time and store the collected data at a lower storage cost. In addition, we give two examples to illustrate how our method can be used in a variety of applications.