Protecting BGP Routes to Top Level DNS Servers

—The Domain Name System (DNS) is an essential part of the Internet infrastructure and provides fundamental services, such as translating host names into IP addresses for Internet communication. The DNS is vulnerable to a number of potential faults and attacks. In particular, false routing announcements can deny access to the DNS service or redirect DNS queries to a malicious impostor. Due to the hierarchical DNS design, a single fault or attack against the routes to any of the top-level DNS servers can disrupt Internet services to millions of users. In this paper, we propose a path-filtering approach to protect the routes to the critical top-level DNS servers. Our approach exploits both the high degree of redundancy in top-level DNS servers and the observation that popular destinations, including top-level DNS servers, are well-connected via stable routes. Our path-filter restricts the potential top-level DNS server route changes to be within a set of established paths. Heuristics de...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Lan Wang, Xiaoliang Zhao, Dan Pei, Randy Bush, Daniel Massey, Allison Mankin, Shyhtsun Felix Wu, Lixia Zhang
• Keywords: Critical Top-level Dns, Distributed And Parallel Computing, DNS Service, ICDCS 2003, Top-level Dns Servers