Dart: An Automated and Reproducible Environment Toolkit for DNS Protocol Analysis

Abstract

Domain Name System (DNS) protocol analysis is fundamental to understanding and fortifying the Internet naming infrastructure. However, the lack of automated, portable, and user-friendly environment orchestration tools imposes significant overhead on researchers and severely limits the reproducibility of DNS studies. In this paper, we present Dart, an automated toolkit specifically engineered for DNS protocol analysis. Dart employs a declarative syntax to abstract the intricate software dependencies and heterogeneous configuration requirements of diverse DNS implementations, providing a unified and streamlined orchestration interface. We describe the architecture of Dart and evaluate its performance. Furthermore, we present two case studies that illustrate how Dart enables researchers to construct portable DNS analysis environments with a single command. To foster transparency and facilitate future research, all replicated environments and configurations will be open-sourced.