e-Infrastructure and e-Services for Developing Countries. 8th International Conference, AFRICOMM 2016, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, December 6-7, 2016, Proceedings

Research Article

DNS Lame Delegations: A Case-Study of Public Reverse DNS Records in the African Region

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-319-66742-3_22,
        author={Amreesh Phokeer and Alain Aina and David Johnson},
        title={DNS Lame Delegations: A Case-Study of Public Reverse DNS Records in the African Region},
        proceedings={e-Infrastructure and e-Services for Developing Countries. 8th International Conference, AFRICOMM 2016, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, December 6-7, 2016, Proceedings},
        proceedings_a={AFRICOMM},
        year={2017},
        month={10},
        keywords={Reverse DNS Misconfigurations Lame delegation Non-authoritative nameservers},
        doi={10.1007/978-3-319-66742-3_22}
    }
    
  • Amreesh Phokeer
    Alain Aina
    David Johnson
    Year: 2017
    DNS Lame Delegations: A Case-Study of Public Reverse DNS Records in the African Region
    AFRICOMM
    Springer
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-66742-3_22
Amreesh Phokeer1,*, Alain Aina2,*, David Johnson3,*
  • 1: AFRINIC
  • 2: WACREN
  • 3: CSIR
*Contact email: amreesh@afrinic.net, alain.aina@wacren.net, djohnson@csir.co.za

Abstract

The DNS, as one of the oldest components of the modern Internet, has been studied multiple times. It is a known fact that operational issues such as mis-configured name servers affect the responsiveness of the DNS service which could lead to delayed responses or failed queries. One of such misconfigurations is lame delegation and this article explains how it can be detected and also provides guidance to the African Internet community as to whether a policy lame reverse DNS should be enforced. It also gives an overview of the degree of lameness of the AFRINIC reverse domains where it was found that 45% of all reverse domains are lame.