Discovering Critical Nodes on the Internet

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the hierarchical naming system used to locate hosts on the Internet. The most important task of a name server is to translate the human meaningful domain names to IP addresses. A DNS "Start of Authority" (SOA) is the DNS server responsible for a particular network. In this project, we are interested in the number of SOAs on the Internet and the paths messages take to the SOAs from various points in the network. Knowing these paths we can decide which routers are critical for the availability of large portions of the Internet and thus deserve special protection or additional redundancy.