Protecting BGP routes to top-level DNS servers

Abstract

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. 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 derived from routing operations are used to adjust the potential routes over time. We tested our path-filtering design against BGP routing logs and the results show that the design can effectively ensure correct routes to top-level DNS servers without impacting DNS service availability.