Unravelling Ariadne's Thread: Exploring the Threats of Decentalised DNS

TL;DR

This paper investigates the security threats of blockchain-based DNS systems, analyzing real-world data from browser extensions, blockchain platforms, and registered domains, and proposes countermeasures for these threats.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive threat analysis of blockchain DNS, including emerging issues, validated with real-world data, and suggests potential countermeasures.

Findings

Identified multiple security threats in blockchain DNS ecosystems.

Validated threats through analysis of real-world data from Namecoin and Emercoin.

Proposed countermeasures to mitigate identified security issues.

Abstract

The current landscape of the core Internet technologies shows considerable centralisation with the big tech companies controlling the vast majority of traffic and services. This has sparked a wide range of decentralisation initiatives with perhaps the most profound and successful being the blockchain technology. In the past years, a core Internet infrastructure, domain name system (DNS), is being revised mainly due to its inherent security and privacy issues. One of the proposed panaceas is Blockchain-based DNS, which claims to solve many issues of traditional DNS. However, this does not come without security concerns and issues, as any introduction and adoption of a new technology does - let alone a disruptive one such as blockchain. In this work, we discuss a number of associated threats, including emerging ones, and we validate many of them with real-world data. In this regard, we explore a part of the blockchain DNS ecosystem in terms of the browser extensions using such technologies, the chain itself (Namecoin and Emercoin), the domains, and users which have been registered in both platforms. Finally, we provide some countermeasures to address the identified threats, and we propose a fertile common ground for further research.