Subject: [dns-dir] Implications of aggressive pre-fetching of DNS data

From: Olafur Gudmundsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2011 10:38:47 -0400

For usability and page load time reasons number of browsers have started 
to aggressively query for DNS names in the current page being displayed.

This
	- leads to more DNS traffic
  	- may have implications on memory consumption by DNS resolvers,
	- could be used as a DoS mechanishm
	- could be used for tracking users by using specialy crafted DNS 
queries in links that will never will be clicked on.

and more.

In general this is an example where one party on the internet may do 
things that "improve her measures" while harming others.

The goal of this discussion is to see if we want to encourage some 
research on this issue, and possibly reach out and try to start a dialog 
to moderate the effects of DNS pre-fetching.

	Olafur

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From: Matt Larson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2011 11:37:08 -0400

On Thu, 31 Mar 2011, Olafur Gudmundsson wrote:
> research on this issue,

We've done a little research to understand popular browser behavior.
It's not quite in good enough shape to release (yet).

> and possibly reach out and try to start a dialog to moderate the
> effects of DNS pre-fetching.

I'm extremely pessimistic that any moderation of the browser vendors'
position is possible.  It's a never-ending race to render pages as
fast as possible and now that they've discovered pre-fetching,
there'll be no reversing this behavior.  DNS infrastructure providers
just need to provision accordingly and deal with it.

Matt