Wouter B. de Vries, a Ph.D. candidate in the DACS group, has won the Best Open Dataset Award at TMA 2018, which took place from June 25-29 in Vienna, Austria. The award was presented during the closing ceremony of the conference.
Wouter received the award for the dataset accompanying his paper entitled "Passive Observations of a Large DNS Service: 2.5 Years in the Life of Google". The paper studies the workings of the Google Public DNS service by leveraging a relatively recent DNS feature that allows public DNS resolvers, such as Google, to transmit information on the original client that sent a query to authoritative name server. This feature is intended to assist content delivery networks in serving localized content to users. Wouter's paper, however, shows that this information provides an excellent way to study how Google's service works, and uncovers a number of previously unknown privacy problems in the service. In terms of privacy problems, the most important find is that mail servers that use Google Public DNS to perform DNS resolving unwittingly leak information about who is sending e-mail to whom to multiple third parties in the DNS ecosystem.
The dataset accompanying the paper has been made available for long term use through the 4TU data repository.
Link to the paper:
http://tma.ifip.org/2018/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/06/tma2018_paper30.pdf
Link to the dataset:
https://data.4tu.nl/repository/uuid:1ef815ea-cb39-4b41-8db6-c1008af6d5aa
