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Enabling Entangled Cache Probing for Remotely Reconstructing DNS Query Dynamics

delete2026-05-05
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PRE
AI
J
Jianfeng Li
Z
Zheng Lin
J
Jianhao Li
W
Wen Li
Y
Yifei Gao
Q
Qinyu Liu
X
Xiaobo Ma
王伟 (Wei Wang)
X
Xiapu Luo
X
Xiaohong Guan
DOI:10.1109/TON.2026.3690532delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
The domain name system (DNS) is indispensable to nearly every Internet service. It has been extensively utilized for network activity characterization in passive and active approaches. Compared to the passive approach, active DNS cache probing is lightweight and non-cooperative, enabling worldwide characterization of remote network activities in different networks. Unfortunately, existing probing-based methods are too coarse-grained to characterize the time-varying features of network activities, substantially limiting their applications in time-sensitive tasks. In this paper, we advance DnsScope, a temporally fine-grained DNS cache probing framework by addressing three key challenges: cache entanglement, sample sparsity, and observational distortion. DnsScope introduces three novel probing strategies, extending active DNS cache probing from single-cache to heterogeneous recursive DNS (R-DNS) resolvers. It synthesizes statistical learning and transfer learning to achieve time-varying characterization of remote network activity. Extensive evaluations demonstrate DnsScope’s adaptability for R-DNS resolvers with diverse cache structures and its effectiveness in accurately estimating time-varying DNS query arrival rates, achieving an average mean absolute error of 0.124, as low as one-sixth that of the baseline methods. We also demonstrate DnsScope’s application to network anomaly detection.
Keywords:
Domain name system
network measurement
active DNS probing

Journal

I
IEEE Transactions on Networking
IF:
0
Papers:
543
Citations:
0

Organization

X
xi'an jiaotong university
Scholars:
9.2W
Papers: 6.6W
Citations: 75
T
the hong kong polytechnic university
Scholars:
4.7K
Papers: 2.6K
Citations: 0