What's in a name?

Abstract

DNS names assigned to interfaces of network devices along an end-to-end path are an important source of information for both operations and research. Our study focuses on the interface DNS names that encode detailed information about the device e.g., interface type, bandwidth, manufacturer. In this paper we describe a methodology for discovering and characterizing the structure of diverse interface DNS names. We extract, organize and assess the details of the encoding used in different networks. The results of our analysis show that many different encodings are used, and that meaningful encodings are common in the core of the Internet. To enable interface DNS name decoding to be used in practice, we incorporate our information extraction library into a new version of traceroute that we call PathAudit.