O'Reilly Velocity

Lex Neva from Heroku will be speaking at O'Reilly Velocity in New York. His session title and abstract is below.

The Phone Book is On Fire: Lessons from the Dyn DNS DDoS

I thought I knew a lot about DNS, but the Dyn DDoS last October showed me that I had much more to learn. I spent the following month deep-diving to figure out how to implement resilient DNS properly: reading RFCs, Googling, asking questions of pros, and performing real-world experiments when no one knew the answers. In this talk, I’ll share what I learned and how I learned it.

Opinions on how to react to a DDoS against your nameservers vastly differ. Some companies lowered the TTL for their in-zone NS records to make it easier to add a new nameserver in a crisis. I’ll show you my empirical proof that this doesn’t work.

Adding a redundant DNS server in advance is a good solution, but it can be much harder than it sounds. What can you do if your DNS records are heavily dynamic and your provider doesn’t offer AXFR support? I’ll go through the options.

Even if you’re a seasoned DNS pro, I aim to surprise you with my discoveries.