"Unnecessary Traffic Saturating a Key Internet 'Root' Server" Newswise (01/24/03)

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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From: Marcia Boalen <boalen () HQ ACM ORG>
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 11:54:15 -0500
To: TECHNEWS () LISTSERV2 ACM ORG
Subject: ACM TechNews; Friday, January 24, 2003

"Unnecessary Traffic Saturating a Key Internet 'Root' Server"
Newswise (01/24/03)

Scientists at the University of California's San Diego
Supercomputer Center (SDSC) have found that 98 percent of the
address mapping requests sent to the Internet's 13 root servers
are unnecessary.  The researchers studied 152 million requests
sent on Oct. 4, 2002, to one root server in California for their
analysis, which they will present to Richard A. Clarke, chairman
of the federal Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, later
this month.  Clarke has warned that the Domain Name System (DNS)
and its 13 root servers are vulnerable and could disrupt the
entire Internet if attacked simultaneously.  Such an attack did
occur in October of last year, but damage was minimal.  The SDSC
scientists discovered that about 70 percent of all received
traffic was duplicated, and suggested that ISPs and lower-tier
servers could cache the answers to these queries in order to
reduce the load at the top level.  The study also found that
approximately 12 percent of requests were for nonexistent
top-level domains, and that 7 percent had the IP address embedded
within the request, making it frivolous.  SDSC researcher Duane
Wessels says a major source of the bad requests was the result of
misconfigured firewall and packet filter software that bounced
back responses from the DNS.  The system requesting the data
therefore kept sending queries.  Wessels created a tool for
server administrators called dnstop that can help identify and
fix these misconfigurations.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/2003/1/SDSCROOT.UCD.html


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