DRAFT On Modern DNS Behavior and Properties

The Internet crucially depends on the Domain Name System (DNS) to both allow users to interact with the system in human-friendly terms and also increasingly as a way to direct traffic to the best content replicas at the instant the content is requested. While previous efforts have characterized DNS, the DNS ecosystem has evolved over time and this paper is therefore an initial study into the behavior and properties of the modern DNS system. We passively monitor DNS and related traffic within a residential network in an effort to understand the impact of DNS server behavior—as viewed through DNS responses—as well as client behavior surrounding DNS lookups—as viewed through both DNS requests and traffic that follows from DNS responses.