Analysis of authoritative Name Servers of the ".be" zone

Abstract

The Domain Name System (DNS) is an important protocol on the Web. Name Servers for top-level domains, such as ".be", ".fr", or ".de" for country-code domains, or ".com", ".net", or ".org" for generic domains, must therefore be high-performance, resilient, and available to the maximum extent possible.

The majority of Name Servers in these zones use an "Anycast" architecture. Anycast is a technique that allows you to have, under a single IP address, several instances of the same server, in different locations. This type of architecture makes it possible to have, as several studies have shown, better resilience to Denial of Service attacks and better performance.

In this work, the focus is on the specific infrastructure of DNS Belgium, the manager of the Name Servers for the ".be" zone. First of all, we propose a review of the literature on the architectures to be implemented, and on different strategies to further improve the performance and resilience of the servers. Then, a comparative study on the latency of the services of different Name Servers is proposed, based on Network Probes scattered around the world. Finally, an analysis of the network traces of the DNS Belgium infrastructure's Name Servers is carried out, in order to complete the analysis of the performance of this infrastructure.

Date of Award	24 Jun 2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Namur
Supervisor	Laurent Schumacher (Supervisor)