A Quantitative Method for Measuring Health of Authoritative Name Servers

Abstract

The Domain Name System - DNS is regarded as one of the critical infrastructure component of the global Internet because a large-scale DNS outage would effectively take a typical user offline. Therefore, the Internet community should ensure that critical components of the DNS ecosystem - that is, root name servers, top-level domain registrars and registries, authoritative name servers, and recursive resolvers - function smoothly. To this end, the community should monitor them periodically and provide public alerts about abnormal behavior. The authors propose a novel quantitative approach for evaluating the health of authoritative name servers – a critical, core, and a large component of the DNS ecosystem. The performance is typically measured in terms of response time, reliability, and throughput for most of the Internet components. This research work proposes a novel list of parameters specifically for determining the health of authoritative name servers: DNS attack permeability, latency comparison, and DNSSEC validation.