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Dissecting DNS Stakeholders in Mobile Networks

Published: 28 November 2017 Publication History

Abstract

The functioning of mobile apps involves a large number of protocols and entities, with the Domain Name System (DNS) acting as a predominant one. Despite being one of the oldest Internet systems, DNS still operates with semi-obscure interactions among its stakeholders: domain owners, network operators, operating systems, and app developers. The goal of this work is to holistically understand the dynamics of DNS in mobile traffic along with the role of each of its stakeholders. We use two complementary (anonymized) datasets: traffic logs provided by a European mobile network operator (MNO) with 19M customers, and traffic logs from 5,000 users of Lumen, a traffic monitoring app for Android. We complement such passive traffic analysis with active measurements at four European MNOs. Our study reveals that 10k domains (out of 198M) account for 87% of total network flows. The time to live (TTL) values for such domains are mostly short (< 1min), despite domain-to-IPs mapping tends to change on a longer time-scale. Further, depending on the operators recursive resolver architecture, end-user devices receive even smaller TTL values leading to suboptimal effectiveness of the on-device DNS cache. Despite a number of on-device and in-network optimizations available to minimize DNS overhead, which we find corresponding to 10% of page load time (PLT) on average, we have not found wide evidence of their adoption in the wild.

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  • (2023)Enterprise DNS Asset Mapping and Cyber-Health Tracking via Passive Traffic AnalysisIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2022.322198120:3(3699-3716)Online publication date: Sep-2023
  • (2022)SEEDProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference10.1145/3544216.3544260(129-142)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
  • (2022)Hide and Seek: Revisiting DNS-based User Tracking2022 IEEE 7th European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)10.1109/EuroSP53844.2022.00020(188-205)Online publication date: Jun-2022
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cover image ACM Conferences
CoNEXT '17: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies
November 2017
492 pages
ISBN:9781450354226
DOI:10.1145/3143361
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 28 November 2017

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Author Tags

  1. Mobile DNS traffic
  2. caching
  3. ephemeral domains
  4. page load time (PLT)
  5. time to live (TTL)

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Enterprise DNS Asset Mapping and Cyber-Health Tracking via Passive Traffic AnalysisIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2022.322198120:3(3699-3716)Online publication date: Sep-2023
  • (2022)SEEDProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference10.1145/3544216.3544260(129-142)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
  • (2022)Hide and Seek: Revisiting DNS-based User Tracking2022 IEEE 7th European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)10.1109/EuroSP53844.2022.00020(188-205)Online publication date: Jun-2022
  • (2021)Transparent forwardersProceedings of the 17th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies10.1145/3485983.3494872(454-462)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2021
  • (2021)DePL: Detecting Privacy Leakage in DNS-over-HTTPS Traffic2021 IEEE 20th International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom)10.1109/TrustCom53373.2021.00088(577-586)Online publication date: Oct-2021
  • (2020)Putting DNS in ContextProceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3419394.3423659(309-316)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2020
  • (2020)NexGen Connectivity Optimizer: An Enhancement of Smart Phone Performance for Better ConnectivityICC 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)10.1109/ICC40277.2020.9149255(1-7)Online publication date: Jun-2020
  • (2020)HttpDNS: A Flexible Architecture for Edge Server Exploration and Selection in 5G Network2020 IEEE 22nd International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications; IEEE 18th International Conference on Smart City; IEEE 6th International Conference on Data Science and Systems (HPCC/SmartCity/DSS)10.1109/HPCC-SmartCity-DSS50907.2020.00137(1021-1029)Online publication date: Dec-2020
  • (2020)Reducing User Perceived Latency in Smart Phones Exploiting IP Network DiversityIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.30143898(143055-143065)Online publication date: 2020
  • (2019)Tackling Mobile Traffic Critical Path Analysis With Passive and Active Measurements2019 Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA)10.23919/TMA.2019.8784636(105-112)Online publication date: Jun-2019
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