Abstract

Concern has been mounting about Internet centralization over the few last years–consolidation of traffic/users/infrastructure into the hands of a few market players. We measure DNS and computing centralization by analyzing DNS traffic collected at a DNS root server and two country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs)–one in Europe and the other in Oceania–and show evidence of concentration. More than 30% of all queries to both ccTLDs are sent from 5 large cloud providers. We compare the clouds’ resolver infrastructure and highlight a discrepancy in behavior: some cloud providers heavily employ IPv6, DNSSEC, and DNS over TCP, while others simply use unsecured DNS over UDP over IPv4. We show one positive side to centralization: once a cloud provider deploys a security feature–such as QNAME minimization–it quickly benefits a large number of users.

Date

September 24, 2020

Authors

Giovane CM Moura, Sebastian Castro, Wes Hardaker