Measuring open DNS resolver use

https://blog.apnic.net/2019/09/23/dns-resolver-centrality/

by xuande • 7 years ago

47 52 7 years ago

blog.apnic.net

gerdesj• 7 years ago

The argument is well known: the intertubes promises much equanimity but capitalism and stuff.

OK I am being a bit cruel but this is what we have. If you don't own up to intending to cuddle up to Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft in the next 30s then you are probably a liar or a bit deluded.

Thing is, I'm a bit of a fan of capitalism but perhaps some sort of light touch regulation is needed in the Wild West. A bloke with a big old star on the chest might be nice.

pnako• 7 years ago

It's probably even worse than what you describe. You'll be cuddling up to the Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft of whichever global power you're closest to.

I'm in Australia, so I don't know if in twenty years I'll still be connected to Westnet or Sinonet. I'll probably buy a black market connection to Westnet from a guy with a mohawk and implants in his head.

troquerre3• 7 years ago

Agreed. The world is trending towards an internet that's split up between the different countries. There are some technologies that can counter that (ie check my bio) but it'll be an uphill battle imo.

PaulHoule• 7 years ago

I think DNS-over-HTTPS is a much bigger cause for concern.

cracker_jacks• 7 years ago

What is the cause for concern? I am trying to understand why DNS-over-HTTPS could be a bad thing from the user end.

tptacek14• 7 years ago

It's not. It's an unalloyed good thing. The concern is with configurations that make it hard to use anything but Cloud Flare. There are alternatives.

robertcope• 7 years ago

It makes it very hard to control your network. I have a DNS setup at home that I want all my equipment using. It blocks ads and other sites I don't want accessed. With DoH, I can't really be sure that browsers, devices, etc aren't using an alternative DNS system.

mike_d3• 7 years ago

Folks here might be interested in my own (more tl;dr) survey of public resolver usage: https://twitter.com/mikedamm/status/1136409254305263616?s=20

troquerre3• 7 years ago

Do you know how Cloudflare picked up so much market share even with 8.8.8.8 around?

ssvss• 7 years ago

Google doesn’t promote 8.8.x.x lately, so when there were some sites being blocked by Indian ISPs, I saw cloudflare DNS being recommended. Also I believe cloudflare doesn’t implement ban-lists provided by Indian courts. I have noticed sites blocked in google dns, working with cloudflare dns.

kijin2• 7 years ago

What this data shows is that concerns about centralization, especially in relation to DoH, are overblown. Only 1.15% of users in this dataset are using Cloudflare DNS, and APNIC is in a region riddled with government censorship and crappy ISPs -- two major incentives for people to try alternative resolvers. Without such incentives, nobody would even bother to change their devices' DNS settings.

I'm in a country with both of these problems, so every machine I set up gets Cloudflare as the primary resolver with Google as the secondary. Fix these problems first, and I won't have to do this anymore. Centralization? I dunno. Taking control of DNS away from my state and ISP would actually count as decentralization in my book.

troquerre3• 7 years ago

Agree that shifting control from your state and ISP are beneficial, but centralizing DNS to one or two for-profit providers in the process is less than ideal IMO. I'm working on a project that's aiming to make DNS fully decentralized and wrote an explainer article in case you're interested https://www.namebase.io/blog/meet-handshake-decentralizing-d...

If it's not too revealing, can you share what country you're in?

kijin2• 7 years ago

Sure, even more decentralization would be good. Nevertheless, I think the usual concerns about Cloudflare are massively overblown and misses a crucial role that they're playing in the fight against censorship and surveillance.

Cloudflare is the first well-known provider that decided to support a working protocol for encrypted DNS. DoH might not be the best possible protocol, but it's shipping now and others are not. (DNSCrypt is also shipping, but it has the weird property of speaking something that isn't HTTPS on port 443. That's too easy to censor.) There will be healthy competition if other people would please stop arguing and start shipping, too.

I'm in South Korea. The censorship regime here is more prudish than draconian, and I'm not in any danger of prosecution for criticizing it. The way it is implemented is extremely crappy, though. On top of DNS-based censorship, ISPs are doing DPI on TLS handshakes to sniff hostnames in the SNI extension. Lots of techies here are very interested in new technologies showcased by Cloudflare. That includes not only DoH but also their proposal to use keys stored in DNS to close the SNI loophole. Once again, what works in this situation is not a novel, theoretically perfect protocol but one that ships now and blends into the petabytes of HTTPS traffic that Cloudflare handles every day.

amalcon• 7 years ago

I've worked on software that attempts to estimate the end-user demand represented by a given resolver. Most of the specifics are covered by NDA, but suffice to say that it's surprisingly difficult to do accurately. There is a lot of non-standard behavior in various resolver software, some of it avoidable, some of it not.

This trick of altering the hostname of a subresource to identify the client is a thing I long wished we could do, but sadly we didn't have enough control of the content to do that.

3xblah2• 7 years ago

How about measuring zone file access programs?

How many users utilise the full number of existing domain names in the world today?

How many names do users realistically need to access in a lifetime?

What if we exclude ad servers and other domains that exist solely for marketing?

It depends on the user, but in some cases the majority of their non-commercial web^1 use can be accomplished without ever making remote DNS queries; the IP addresses can be stored and used on a long-term basis. That is because a user may only visit the same small number of websites. The foregoing is of course only an opinion based on testing conducted by yours truly. Every user is different.

Try measuring how many times the non-commercial websites you visit change IP addresses in a year.

You might find that DNS resolution is like that "definition of insanity" meme: making the same query day after day, expecting a different answer.

1 It makes a difference whether or not a user is using the web to make purchases. For making purchases online, DNS resolution is almost always required. Domains and IP addresses in that context are constantly changing. Go figure. OTOH, if you are visiting a website such as news.ycombinator.com on a frequent basis, is it really necessary to look up the IP address for news.ycombinator.com every time you visit the website? I have used the same IP address for years at a time.

Measuring open DNS resolver use

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