Modeling, Measuring, and Analyzing the Resolution Process of Popular Domains

The DNS system is gradually becoming the infrastructure of many services and applications. The availability and security of the domain name resolution process must be guaranteed. We propose a graph-based formal model and a general analysis method for quantifying the name resolution process. We define metrics to quantify the availability and security of resolution process for a domain name. We conducted four measurements of the top 1 million popular domains within a one-year period. Our survey shows that for more than 50% of domains, if the most critical authoritative server of the domain name becomes unavailable or compromised, the probability of resolution failure or insecure answer is over 50%.