Assessing Resilience in Authoritative DNS Infrastructure Supporting Government Services

2025-12-15

AI Summary

This study addresses the risk of disruption to government service authoritative DNS infrastructure under threats including natural disasters, geopolitical conflicts, and targeted attacks. We propose the first resilience assessment framework explicitly structured across four layers: physical hosting, server functionality, name server (NS) deployment, and instance-level configuration. Our method integrates heterogeneous data sources—including WHOIS, DNSSEC records, RIPE Atlas measurements, and active DNS probing—to construct a multi-source, cross-layer data model and design a standardized, internationally comparable authoritative DNS resilience scoring algorithm. Applying this framework to six countries, we systematically identify structural vulnerabilities—such as geographic concentration of hosting providers, insufficient NS redundancy, and suboptimal TTL configurations—at the authoritative DNS level. The results provide quantitative evidence and actionable recommendations for enhancing the resilience governance of critical internet infrastructure. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Security
• Search and Optimization: Algorithm Configuration
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization

Abstract

Online government services are increasingly regarded as critical national infrastructure. Because these services directly influence public trust, any disruption can have significant societal and political consequences. Yet their supporting infrastructures remain vulnerable to outages from natural disasters, geopolitical tensions, and targeted attacks. Central to their operation is the authoritative Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure, the single source of truth that maps government domain names to service endpoints. While indispensable, this infrastructure also represents a potential and critical point of system failure. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive assessment framework with purpose-designed mechanisms to systematically evaluate the operational resilience of authoritative DNS infrastructure supporting government services. Complementing prior studies on website hosting, recursive resolution, and DNS record integrity, our work provides a holistic view of authoritative DNS operation. Our first contribution develops a multi-sourced data schema that characterizes a (government) domain's authoritative DNS infrastructure across four hierarchical levels: physical hosting infrastructure, server functionality, name servers, and individual hosting instances. Using data collected from six representative countries, our second contribution identifies resilience attributes at their finest applicable hierarchy across three operational phases: infrastructure placement, service configuration, and DNS record dispatch. Our method assigns numerical scores to each attribute and aggregates them algorithmically to enable consistent and cross-domain comparisons. We apply our method to government domains in the six countries, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses in authoritative DNS resilience and pinpointing operational practices that require improvement.

Problem

• Assesses resilience of authoritative DNS for government services.
• Evaluates infrastructure across physical, server, and operational phases.
• Identifies strengths and weaknesses in DNS resilience practices.

Innovation

• Multi-sourced data schema across four hierarchical levels
• Numerical scoring of resilience attributes in operational phases
• Algorithmic aggregation for cross-domain comparison