The paper “A First Look at QNAME Minimization in the Domain Name System” will appear in the 2019 Passive and Active Measurement (PAM) conference on March 27-29, 2019 in Puerto Varas, Chile.

You can download the entire paper here.

From the abstract:

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a critical part of network and Internet infrastructure; DNS lookups precede almost any user request. DNS lookups may contain private information about the sites and services a user contacts, which has spawned efforts to protect privacy of users, such as transport encryption through DNS-over-TLS or DNS-over-HTTPS. In this work, we provide a first look on the resolver-side technique of query name minimization (qmin), which was standardized in March 2016 as RFC 7816. qmin aims to only send minimal information to authoritative name servers, reducing the number of servers that full DNS query names are exposed to. Using passive and active measurements, we show a slow but steady adoption of qmin on the Internet, with a surprising variety in implementations of the standard. Using controlled experiments in a test-bed, we validate lookup behavior of various resolvers, and quantify that qmin both increases the number of DNS lookups by up to 26%, and also leads to up to 5% more failed lookups. We conclude our work with a discussion of qmin’s risks and benefits, and give advice for future use.

The work in this paper was joint work by Wouter B. de Vries (University of Twente), Quirin Scheitle (TU Munich), Moritz Müller (SIDN Labs and University of Twente), Willem Toorop (NLnet Labs), Ralph Dolmans (NLnet Labs) and Roland van Rijswijk-Deij (University of Twente and NLnet Labs).

The datasets used in the paper are available at https://www.simpleweb.org/wiki/index.php/Traces#A_First_Look_at_QNAME_Minimization_in_the_Domain_Name_System.