Towards a Model of DNS Client Behavior.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a critical component of the Internet infrastructure as it maps human-readable hostnames into the IP addresses the network uses to route traffic. Yet, the DNS behavior of individual clients is not well understood. In this paper, we present a characterization of DNS clients with an eye towards developing an analytical model of client interaction with the larger DNS ecosystem. While this is initial work and we do not arrive at a DNS workload model, we highlight a variety of behaviors and characteristics that enhance our mental models of how DNS operates and move us towards an analytical model of client-side DNS operation.