Towards tackling privacy disclosure issues in Domain Name Service

Abstract

Serving as the global Internet's phonebook, the Domain Name Service (DNS) helps to translate human-friendly domain names into machine-readable IP addresses, which makes DNS of great importance to the operation of the Internet and virtually relied on by today's almost all kinds of Internet-based activities. As such, people whoever want to go anywhere over the Internet will need to refer to the DNS first. Therefore, it has become an ideal way to conduct online privacy exploitations through the DNS due to people's pervasive usage of the Internet. However, the current DNS doesn't provide any countermeasure against this kind of exploitation, and thus risks severe privacy disclosure problems. In this paper, we give a comprehensive empirical analysis of DNS privacy disclosure problems by exploring potential privacy leaking paths in the DNS. Then we further identify and describe multiple criterions of validity systematically that are obligated when considering DNS privacy preservation. Finally, we propose a simple DNS privacy preserving solution with significant deployment potential in the current DNS, which can only lead to a moderate level of extra query latency perceived by end users.