DNS HEALTH VISUALIZATION?

The Internet is a highly decentralized and distributed infrastructure, which consists of critical components like IP routing, DNS for ensuring its availability and accessibility. The ever-growing Internet with its phenomenal growth of Websites has led the DNS Extension Working Group (DNSEXT) of the Internet Standards organization ? IETF - to identify DNS as the “Critical Infrastructure”. DNS enables naming services used by every internet user, networked application and networked critical infrastructure. Without the availability of DNS, it will be extremely difficult for users to access websites and emails and such other important functions. One of the key challenges in ensuring the availability of DNS is to periodically monitor the global DNS health, which requires resolving challenges such as defining the parameters of DNS health, collecting and collating summarized data from various sources and perform the visualization activity within a short-period of time, so that any counter-measures to protect the DNS health can be taken at the earliest. Visualizing the DNS health requires dealing with different kinds of nodes, analyzing their typical response patterns, their current loads etc., and provides intuitive visualizations for the decision makers - especially the DNS operators at various levels to deal with any threats to the security and stability of the DNS. In this paper, DNS health visualization has been attempted, using commonly available tools, and evaluated for its usefulness and usability.