Towards a Behavioral and Privacy Analysis of ECS for IPv6 DNS Resolvers

Abstract

The Domain Name System (DNS) is critical to Internet communications. EDNS Client Subnet (ECS), a DNS extension, allows recursive resolvers to include client subnet information in DNS queries to improve CDN end-user mapping, extending the visibility of client information to a broader range. Major content delivery network (CDN) vendors, content providers (CP), and public DNS service providers (PDNS) are accelerating their IPv6 infrastructure development. With the increasing deployment of IPv6-enabled services and DNS being the most foundational system of the Internet, it becomes important to analyze the behavioral and privacy status of IPv6 resolvers. However, there is a lack of research on ECS for IPv6 DNS resolvers.In this paper, we study the ECS deployment and compliance status of IPv6 resolvers. Our measurement shows that 11.12% IPv6 open resolvers implement ECS. We discuss abnormal noncompliant scenarios that exist in both IPv6 and IPv4 that raise privacy and performance issues. Additionally, we measured if the sacrifice of clients’ privacy can enhance IPv6 CDN performance. We find that in some cases ECS helps end-user mapping but with an unnecessary privacy loss. And even worse, the exposure of client address information can sometimes backfire, which deserves attention from both Internet users and PDNSes.