Toward Accurate Inference of Web Activities from Passive DNS Data

DNS is a critical component of Internet architecture. Almost all applications, in particular web based applications that constitute the large majority of current Internet traffic, leverage heavily on DNS. This makes DNS based measurements a promising tool for understanding global properties of Internet traffic, e.g., sites audience, traffic matrix. However, using passive DNS traces from local DNS servers is challenging because of DNS caching and NATs. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we show how to correct the bias due to DNS cache and the wide use of NATs, to extract meaningful traffic information from DNS traces. The techniques are then used and validated over a large dataset (10 ¹¹ records) containing two days of full DNS access from a major ISP providing both mobile and landline ADSL in China. Second, we focus on the tracking activity and show that although most sites accessed from China belong to Chinese corporations, most trackers belong to US ones. Mobile and ADSL platforms are alike.