Who Uses Google’s DNS?

Much has been said about how Google uses the services they provide, including their mail service, their office productivity tools, file storage and similar services, as a means of gathering an accurate profile of each individual user of their services. The company has made a very successful business out of…


Dotless

It was never obvious at the outset of this grand Internet experiment that the one aspect of the network’s infrastructure that would truly prove to be the most fascinating, intriguing, painful, lucrative and just plain confusing, would be the Internet’s Domain Name System.


A Question of DNS Protocols

One of the most prominent denial of service attacks in recent months was one that occurred in March 2013 between Cloudflare and Spamhaus. How did the attackers generate such massive volumes of attack traffic? The answer lies in the Domain Name System (DNS). The attackers asked about domain names, and…


DNS, DNSSEC and Google’s Public DNS Service

For some time now we’ve been tracking the progress of the deployment of DNSSEC in the Internet. Its been a story of an evolution of the measurement technique, starting with a technique that attempted to guess at the behaviour of resolvers, through to techniques that explicitly pose novel DNS names…


Measuring DNSSEC Performance

There are a number of reasons that both domain name administrators and vendors of client DNS software cite for not incorporating DNSSEC signing into their offerrings. The added complexity of the name administration process when signatures are added to the mix, the challenges of maintaining current root trust keys, and…


DNSSEC and Google’s Public DNS Service

The Domain Name System, or the DNS, is a critical, yet somewhat invisible component of the Internet. The world of the Internet is a world of symbols and words. We invoke applications to interact with services such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, and the interaction is phrased in human readable…


Counting IPv6 in the DNS

At the recent ARIN XXX meeting in October 2012 I listened to a debate on a policy proposal concerning the reservation of a pool of IPv4 addresses to address critical infrastructure. The term “critical infrastructure” is intended to cover a variety of applications, including use by public Internet Exchanges and…


Re-counting DNSSEC

This is a followup article to “Counting DNSSEC” that reflects some further examination of the collected data. This time I’d like to describe some additional thoughts about the experiment, and some revised results in our efforts to count just how much DNSSEC is being used out there. And for those…


Counting DNSSEC

At the Nordunet 2012 conference in September, a presentation included the assertion that “more than 80% of domains could use DNSSEC if they so chose.” This is an interesting claim that speaks to a very rapid rise in the deployment of DNSSEC in recent years, and it raises many questions…


Hacking Away at the Internet’s Security

The front page story of the September 13 2011 issue of the International Herald Tribune said it all: “Iranian activists feel the chill as hacker taps into e-mails.” The news story relates how a hacker has “sneaked into the computer systems of a security firm on the outskirts of Amsterdam”…