[At-Large] [technology taskforce] Ars Technica : A Chrome feature is creating enormous load on global root DNS servers

[Dev Anand Teelucksingh]

It’s to test whether the network  is using NX domain modification (or NX
domain hijacking )

The browser generates three Tld domains on startup or when the network
changes (when switching WiFi providers for eg) - if the browser gets the
same IP address from two of those domains , it knows the network is
modifying the NX errors it should receive and therefore treats any single
word as a search query

Otherwise, it would have to bug the user “did you mean to search for “word”
or https://word” for every single word query

The issue is that for networks reporting NX errors properly the root
servers have to ultimately answer the query if the google generated tld
exists

The apnic blog post says “ but in the 10+ years since the feature was
added, we now find that half of the DNS root server traffic is very likely
due to Chromium’s probes. That equates to about 60 billion queries to the
root server system on a typical day.”

Dev Anand


On Tue, 25 Aug 2020 at 6:35 PM, Carlton Samuels <carlton.samuels at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I'm still left with little understanding of why this is important?
>
> What is the use of these lookups for the browser? A previously undisclosed
> security feature?
>
> And what is being alleged from the name service side? A unintentional
> DOS-type attack on the root server system itself?
>
> CAS.
>
> On Tue, 25 Aug 2020, 3:39 pm Dev Anand Teelucksingh, <devtee at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> The Chromium browser—open source, upstream parent to both Google Chrome
>> and the new Microsoft Edge—is getting some serious negative attention for a
>> well-intentioned feature that checks to see if a user's ISP is "hijacking"
>> non-existent domain results.
>>
>> The Intranet Redirect Detector
>> <https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1090985>, which
>> makes spurious queries for random "domains" statistically unlikely to
>> exist, is responsible for roughly half of the total traffic the world's
>> root DNS servers receive. Verisign engineer Matt Thomas wrote a lengthy
>> APNIC blog post
>> <https://blog.apnic.net/2020/08/21/chromiums-impact-on-root-dns-traffic/> outlining
>> the problem and defining its scope.
>>
>> Read rest of Ars Technica article :
>>
>> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/08/a-chrome-feature-is-creating-enormous-load-on-global-root-dns-servers/
>>
>> The APNIC blog post :
>> https://blog.apnic.net/2020/08/21/chromiums-impact-on-root-dns-traffic/
>>
>> Not aware if this is  mentioned before  in ICANN circles
>>
>> Dev Anand
>>
>>
>>
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