Enhancing Internet Domain Name System Availability by Building Rings of Cooperation Among Cache Resolvers

The domain name system (DNS) is a critical service needed for the continued operation of the Internet. DNS availability can be affected because of failures, misconfigurations or deliberate attacks. In this paper, we propose an approach based on cooperation among DNS cache resolvers that significantly enhances DNS availability. In our approach, cache resolvers join hands and form a cooperative cache sharing network. Searching the network for a DNS name resolution takes O(log N) hops in the worst case, where N is the number of DNS entries in the cache sharing network. We show that our approach scales efficiently, with the communication costs and the number of entries maintained at each node being bounded by the logarithm of the size of the name space.