Enhancing DNS Resilience against Denial of Service Attacks

1001 Words3 Pages

Enhancing DNS Resilience against Denial of Service Attacks

Abstract

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a critical Internet

infrastructure that provides name to address mapping services.

In the past few years, distributed denial of service

(DDoS) attacks have targeted the DNS infrastructure and

threaten to disrupt this critical service. In this paper we

show that the existing DNS can gain significant resilience

against DDoS attacks through a simple change to the current

DNS operations, by setting longer time-to-live values

for a special class of DNS resource records, the infrastructure

records. These records are used to navigate the

DNS hierarchy and change infrequently. Furthermore, in

combination with a set of simple and incrementally deployable

record renewal policies, the DNS service availability

can be improved by one order of magnitude. Our approach

requires neither additional physical resources nor

any change to the existing DNS design. We evaluate the

effectiveness of our proposed enhancement by using DNS

traces collected from multiple locations.

Keywords: DDoS, DNS, resilience, caching

1 Introduction

The Domain Name System (DNS) [16] provides name

services for the Internet. It maps hostnames to IP addresses

and also provides services for a growing number of other

applications, such as mapping IP addresses to geographic

locations or directory services for legacy telephony applications.

Furthermore, protocols such as SMTP and SIP depend

on the DNS in order to route messages through appropriate

application level gateways. As a result, the availability

of the DNS can affect the availability of a large number

of Internet applications. Ensuring the DNS data availability

is an essential part of prov...

... middle of paper ...

...weil, D. Massey, and L. Zhang. Improving

DNS Service Availability by Using Long TTL Values. Internet

Draft, 2006.

[19] K. Parka, V. Pai, L. Peterson, and Z. Wang. CoDNS: Improving

DNS Performance and Reliability via Cooperative Lookups. In Proceedings

of OSDI, 2004.

[20] V. Ramasubramanian and E. Sirer. The Design and Implementation

of a Next Generation Name Service for the Internet. In Proceedings

of SIGCOMM, pages 331–342, 2004.

[21] H. Yang, H. Luo, Y. Yang, S. Lu, and L. Zhang. HOURS: Achieving

DoS Resilience in an Open Service Hierarchy. In Proceedings of

DSN, pages 83–93, 2004.

37th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'07)

0-7695-2855-4/07 $20.00 © 2007

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