Project Overview
Analyzing the Internet's Domain Name System
Department(s)
Computer Science
Abstract
This project centers on analyzing the Domain Name System (DNS), a crucial component of the Internet's infrastructure. The Colgate undergraduate team working on this project will join a team of three professors (Prof. Sommers at Colgate, Prof. Mark Crovella at Boston University, and Prof. Paul Barford at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) and graduate students at BU and UW. The students will be expected to first develop an understanding of the basic operational principles of the DNS. Following that, the specific research task(s) students work on will be somewhat determined by progress made between now and the summer. Some possibilities include: finding strategies for discovering previously-unknown entries in the DNS, developing models to predict which DNS records are likely to change over some time period, identifying patterns in DNS records that suggest malicious behavior, and creating data processing pipelines for DNS record collection and storage.
Student Qualifications
- Having taken COSC 208 is highly desirable. Additional electives (especially COSC 465) are a plus.
Number of Student Researchers
2 students
Project Length
8 weeks
Applications open on 10/03/2023 and close on 02/28/2024