On modern DNS behavior and properties

Abstract

The Internet crucially depends on the Domain Name System (DNS) to both allow users to interact with the system in human-friendly terms and also increasingly as a way to direct traffic to the best content replicas at the instant the content is requested. This paper is an initial study into the behavior and properties of the modern DNS system. We passively monitor DNS and related traffic within a residential network in an effort to understand server behavior--as viewed through DNS responses?and client behavior--as viewed through both DNS requests and traffic that follows DNS responses. We present an initial set of wide ranging findings.