| Abstract: |
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a fundamental building block of the Internet. Today, the performance of more and more applications depend not only on the responsiveness of DNS, but also the
exact answer returned by the queried DNS resolver, e. g., for Content Distribution Networks (CDN). In this paper, we compare local DNS resolvers against GoogleDNS and OpenDNS for a large set of
vantage points. Our end-host measurements inside 50 commercial ISPs reveal that two aspects have a significant impact on responsiveness: (1) the latency to the DNS resolver, (2) the content of
the DNS cache when the query is issued. We also observe significant diversity, even at the AS-level, among the answers provided by the studied DNS resolvers. We attribute this diversity to the
location-awareness of CDNs as well as to the location of DNS resolvers that breaks the assumption made by CDNs about the vicinity of the end-user and its DNS resolver. Our findings pinpoint
limitations within the DNS deployment of some ISPs, as well as the way third-party DNS resolvers bias DNS replies. |
