NDLI: An empirical study of orphan DNS servers in the internet

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Gupta, Minaxi Chen, Lei Myers, Nathan E. Kalafut, Andrew J. Cole, Christopher A.
Abstract	An orphan DNS server is a DNS server which has an address record in the DNS, even though the domain in which it resides has no DNS records itself and hence does not exist. For example, the DNS server ns.foo.com would be an orphan DNS server if it had an address record, but the domain foo.com did not exist. In this paper, we undertake the first systematic study of the prevalence of orphan DNS servers in the Internet. We also examine who is using them and what they are used for. We find that certain top-level domains (TLDs) account for a disproportionate number of orphans. We also find that some orphans are used for malicious activities and as placeholders for records from deleted domains, while others likely only exist due to simple configuration errors. Our study points to the need for better scrutiny of orphan DNS servers so they cannot be misused.
Starting Page	308
Ending Page	314
Page Count	7
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781450304832
DOI	10.1145/1879141.1879182
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	2010-11-01
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Subject Keyword	Top level domains Dns
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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An empirical study of orphan DNS servers in the internet