Three researchers from DACS won the Best Dataset Award at the Passive and Active Measurement Conference 2019, which took place in Puerto Varas, Chile. The award was given for the dataset that accompanied their paper "A First Look at QNAME Minimization in the Domain Name System", authored by Wouter B. de Vries (UT), Quirin Scheitle (TU Munich), Moritz Müller (UT and SIDN), Willem Toorop (NLnet Labs), Ralph Dolmans (NLnet Labs) and Roland van Rijswijk-Deij (UT and NLnet Labs).
The paper provides a first look at the adoption and implementation of the relatively young RFC7816 (standardized in March 2016), which specifies qname minimization (qmin). Qmin is a method which enhances the privacy of DNS queries, by limiting the amount of data that is transmitted to each of the authoritative name servers that are involved in resolving a query. Using passive and active measurements, we show a slow but steady adoption of qmin on the Internet, with a surprising variety in implementations of the standard. Using controlled experiments in a test-bed, we validate lookup behavior of various resolvers, and quantify that qmin both increases the number of DNS lookups by up to 26%, and also leads to up to 5% more failed lookups. We conclude our work with a discussion of qmin’s risks and benefits and give advice for future use.
Link to the dataset:
Link to the paper:
https://wbdv.nl/assets/papers/devries2019.pdf
