How Ready is DNS for an IPv6-Only World?
Florian Streibelt (Max Planck Institut für Informatik)
Patrick Sattler (Technische Universität München)
Franziska Lichtblau (Max Planck Institut für Informatik)
Carlos H Hernandez Ganan (TU Delft - Organisation & Governance)
Anja Feldmann (Max Planck Institut für Informatik)
Oliver Gasser (Max Planck Institut für Informatik)
Tobias Fiebig (Max Planck Institut für Informatik)
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Abstract
DNS is one of the core building blocks of the Internet. In this paper, we investigate DNS resolution in a strict IPv6-only scenario and find that a substantial fraction of zones cannot be resolved. We point out, that the presence of an AAAA resource record for a zone’s nameserver does not necessarily imply that it is resolvable in an IPv6-only environment since the full DNS delegation chain must resolve via IPv6 as well. Hence, in an IPv6-only setting zones may experience an effect similar to what is commonly referred to as lame delegation. Our longitudinal study shows that the continuing centralization of the Internet has a large impact on IPv6 readiness, i.e., a small number of large DNS providers has, and still can, influence IPv6 readiness for a large number of zones. A single operator that enabled IPv6 DNS resolution–by adding IPv6 glue records–was responsible for around 20.3% of all zones in our dataset not resolving over IPv6 until January 2017. Even today, 10% of DNS operators are responsible for more than 97.5% of all zones that do not resolve using IPv6.
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