Characterization of Anycast Adoption in the DNS Authoritative Infrastructure

Raffaele Sommese, Gautam Akiwate, Mattijs Jonker, Giovane Moura, Marco Davids, Roland Martijn van Rijswijk - Deij, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage, Kimberley Claffy, Anna Sperotto

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

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Abstract

Anycast has proven to be an effective mechanism to enhance resilience in the DNS ecosystem and for scaling DNS nameserver capacity, both in authoritative and the recursive resolver infrastructure. Since its adoption for root servers, anycast has mitigated the impact of failures and DDoS attacks on the DNS ecosystem. In this work, we quantify the adoption of anycast to support authoritative domain name service for toplevel and second-level domains (TLDs and SLDs). Comparing two comprehensive anycast census datasets in 2017 and 2021, with DNS measurements captured over the same period, reveals that anycast adoption is increasing, driven by a few large operators. While anycast offers compelling resilience advantage, it also shifts some resilience risk to other aspects of the infrastructure. We discuss these aspects, and how the pervasive use of anycast merits a re-evaluation of how to measure DNS resilience.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationTMA Conference 2021
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings of the 5th Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference, Virtual, September 14-15, 2021
PublisherIFIP
Number of pages9
ISBN (Print)978-3-903176-40-9
Publication statusPublished - 14 Sep 2021
Event5th Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference, TMA 2021 - Virtual
Duration: 14 Sep 202115 Sep 2021
Conference number: 5

Conference

Conference5th Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference, TMA 2021
Abbreviated titleTMA 2021
CityVirtual
Period14/09/2115/09/21

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