A Comparative Study of the DNS Design with DHT-Based Alternatives

The current Domain Name System (DNS) follows a hierarchical tree structure. Several recent efforts proposed to re-implement DNS as a peer-to-peer network with a flat structure that uses Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) to improve the system availability. In this paper we compare the performance and availability of these two designs, enabled by caching and redundancy in both cases. We show that the caching and redundancy mechanisms in each design are closely bound to its system structure. We further demonstrate that each of the two system structures provides unique advantages over the other, while each has its own shortcomings. Using analysis and tracedriven simulations, we show that hierarchical structure enables high performance caching and that DHT structures provide high degree of robustness against targeted attacks. We further show that the current DNS design offers engineering flexibilities which have been utilized to optimize system performance under typical Internet failures and traffic loads, and which can be further extended to overcome DNS weaknesses against the aforementioned attacks.

[1]  Haiyun Luo,et al.  HOURS: achieving DoS resilience in an open service hierarchy , 2004, International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, 2004.

[2]  Robert Tappan Morris,et al.  Serving DNS Using a Peer-to-Peer Lookup Service , 2002, IPTPS.

[3]  Krishna P. Gummadi,et al.  The impact of DHT routing geometry on resilience and proximity , 2003, SIGCOMM '03.

[4]  Robert Tappan Morris,et al.  A performance vs. cost framework for evaluating DHT design tradeoffs under churn , 2005, Proceedings IEEE 24th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies..

[5]  David Mazières,et al.  Democratizing Content Publication with Coral , 2004, NSDI.

[6]  Zhe Wang,et al.  CoDNS: Improving DNS Performance and Reliability via Cooperative Lookups , 2004, OSDI.

[7]  David R. Karger,et al.  Chord: A scalable peer-to-peer lookup service for internet applications , 2001, SIGCOMM '01.

[8]  Daniel Massey,et al.  Impact of configuration errors on DNS robustness , 2004, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[9]  Mark Handley,et al.  A scalable content-addressable network , 2001, SIGCOMM '01.

[10]  Dmitri Loguinov,et al.  Graph-theoretic analysis of structured peer-to-peer systems: routing distances and fault resilience , 2003, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[11]  Michael B. Jones,et al.  SkipNet: A Scalable Overlay Network with Practical Locality Properties , 2003, USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems.

[12]  Hari Balakrishnan,et al.  Modeling TTL-based Internet caches , 2003, IEEE INFOCOM 2003. Twenty-second Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37428).

[13]  Robert Tappan Morris,et al.  DNS performance and the effectiveness of caching , 2001, IMW '01.

[14]  Emin Gün Sirer,et al.  The design and implementation of a next generation name service for the internet , 2004, SIGCOMM.

[15]  Paul V. Mockapetris,et al.  Development of the domain name system , 1988, SIGCOMM '88.

[16]  Peter Druschel,et al.  Providing Administrative Control and Autonomy in Structured Peer-to-Peer Overlays , 2004, IPTPS.