• Corpus ID: 240070515

A First Look at the Consolidation of DNS and Web Hosting Providers

@article{Wang2021AFL,
  title={A First Look at the Consolidation of DNS and Web Hosting Providers},
  author={Synthia Wang and Kyle MacMillan and Brennan Schaffner and Nick Feamster and Marshini Chetty},
  journal={ArXiv},
  year={2021},
  volume={abs/2110.15345}
}
Although the Internet continues to grow, it increasingly depends on a small set of dominant service providers for Domain Name System (DNS) hosting and web hosting providers. This consolidation of Internet resources poses a variety of potential threats to the Internet, including susceptibility to outages, failures, and even overt censorship from platforms. Increasingly, an outage from a single organization can create widespread disruption across a large number of sites and services… 
[PDF] Semantic Reader
2 Citations
Background Citations
1

Figures and Tables from this paper

2 Citations

On the Consolidation of the Internet Domain Name System

This paper studies the Domain Name System (DNS) industry's consolidation in light of multiple country-code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) and generic top-level domains (gT LDs) by resolving and evaluating the authoritative name-servers for all domains in each TLD during five years.

Understanding User Awareness and Behaviors Concerning Encrypted DNS Settings

The findings suggest several important implications for the designers of interfaces for encrypted DNS functionality in both browsers and operating systems to help improve user awareness concerning these settings, and to ensure that users retain the ability to make choices that allow them to balance tradeoffs concerning DNS privacy and performance.

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 22 REFERENCES

Evidence of Decreasing Internet Entropy: The Lack of Redundancy in Dns Resolution by Major Websites and Services

The extent to which the Internet’s global domain name resolution (DNS) system has preserved its distributed resilience given the rise of cloud-based hosting and infrastructure is analyzed.

[inline-graphic not available: see fulltext]: Measuring Centralization of DNS Infrastructure in the Wild

A methodology and associated tool dnstracker is introduced that allows measuring the level of both concentration and shared infrastructure using active DNS measurements, and shows that, in some cases, up to 12.000 authoritative name servers share the same underlying infrastructure of a third-party DNS provider.

Evaluating Public DNS Services in the Wake of Increasing Centralization of DNS

It is observed that even though IP and AS paths to local resolvers are generally shorter, some public DNS services (e.g., Cloudflare, Google, and OpenDNS), achieve faster responses over both IPv4 and IPv6.

Clouding up the Internet: how centralized is DNS traffic becoming?

DNS and computing centralization is measured by analyzing DNS traffic collected at a DNS root server and two country-code top-level domains and shows one positive side to centralization: once a cloud provider deploys a security feature -- such as QNAME minimization -- it quickly benefits a large number of users.

Hosting Industry Centralization and Consolidation

It is seen that American hosting companies have been continuously increasing their presence in the market related to high traffic, popular domains within ccTLDs — except for Russia, notably.

Global Measurement of DNS Manipulation

Iris, a scalable, accurate, and ethical method to measure global manipulation of DNS resolutions, is developed, which reveals widespread DNS manipulation of many domain names.

Considerations on Internet Consolidation and the Internet Architecture

This memo considers the topic from the perspective of how available technology and Internet architecture drives different market directions.

Tranco: A Research-Oriented Top Sites Ranking Hardened Against Manipulation

It is found that it is trivial for an adversary to manipulate the composition of these lists, and the first to empirically validate that the ranks of domains in each of the lists are easily altered through as little as a single HTTP request.

Designing for Tussle in Encrypted DNS

It is argued that refactoring name resolution in a stub resolver that is separate from devices and applications can preserve the benefits of encrypted DNS while satisfying other architectural desiderata, including performance, resilience, and privacy.

Consolidation in the DNS resolver market – how much, how fast, how dangerous?

Almost all online services use a domain name resolution function to translate names typed by the user into numbers that computers understand. This basic, recursive function, performed in millisecon...