Towards an Independent and Resilient DNS

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the crucial naming system of the Internet. Before clients can establish a connection with a service they look up its address in the DNS. Therefore, DNS operators have a large responsibility and a lot of power: if the DNS is not available, clients effectively cannot establish a connection to a service. Also, DNS operators can track and manipulate requests by clients. This can leak personal information, lead to censorship and cause security issues. DNS is designed to be in the hands of many. This makes it more resilient against outages and independent from parties that misuse their power. In practice, however, the DNS becomes concentrated at a few providers - often with negative consequences: e.g., when the DNS provider Dyn suffered an outage in 2016, many services on the Internet went offline. In this PhD research we aim at studying and improving the resilience and independence of the DNS infrastructure. We analyze where on the Internet the DNS is concentrated and discuss the impact of these points of concentration on the resilience and independence. Further, we propose measures to mitigate these impacts.