How Ready Is DNS for an IPv6-Only World?
Abstract
DNS is one of the core building blocks of the Internet. In this paper, we investigate DNS resolution in a strict IPv6-only scenario and find that a substantial fraction of zones cannot be resolved. We point out, that the presence of an AAAA resource record for a zone's nameserver does not necessarily imply that it is resolvable in an IPv6-only environment since the full DNS delegation chain must resolve via IPv6 as well. Hence, in an IPv6-only setting zones may experience an effect similar to what is commonly referred to as lame delegation. Our longitudinal study shows that the continuing centralization of the Internet has a large impact on IPv6 readiness, i.e., a small number of large DNS providers has, and still can, influence IPv6 readiness for a large number of zones. A single operator that enabled IPv6 DNS resolution -- by adding IPv6 glue records -- was responsible for around 20.3% of all zones in our dataset not resolving over IPv6 until January 2017. Even today, 10% of DNS operators are responsible for more than 97.5% of all zones that do not resolve using IPv6.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2302.11393,
title = {How Ready Is DNS for an IPv6-Only World?},
author = {Florian Streibelt and Patrick Sattler and Franziska Lichtblau and Carlos H. Gañán and Anja Feldmann and Oliver Gasser and Tobias Fiebig},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.11393},
year = {2023}
}