DNS is crucial for the Internet, but vulnerable due to plaintext traffic. Despite efforts to standardize Domain Name System (DNS) encryption, its adoption remains limited. Users often lack awareness of privacy risks and the knowledge to enable encryption. To address this, the IETF standardized a new protocol; Discovery of Designated Resolvers (DDR), enabling automatic discovery and upgrade from unencrypted to encrypted DNS traffic. In this study, we present an empirical investigation of the DDR protocol, focusing on its adoption, configuration, and the operational challenges associated with enabling automated transitions to encrypted DNS communication via DNS over Encryption (DoE) protocols. Our results reveal widespread misconfigurations, including incomplete and incorrect DDR configurations that prevent clients from successfully transitioning to encrypted resolvers. In over 99 % of observed cases, DDR-compliant clients may fail to upgrade to DoE due to these deployment issues, underscoring the limitations of DDR in the wild. Additionally, we note a severe resolver consolidation induced by current DDR deployments, as >97 % of DDR-enabled resolvers delegate to major DNS cloud providers, raising concerns about privacy and governance.

The Internet can be considered as the most important infrastructure for modern society and businesses. A loss of Internet connectivity has strong negative financial impacts for businesses and economies. Therefore, assessing Internet connectivity, in particular beyond their own premises and area of direct control, is of growing importance in the face of potential failures, accidents, and malicious attacks. This paper presents CORIA, a software framework for an easy analysis of connectivity risks based on large network graphs. It provides researchers, risk analysts, network managers and security consultants with a tool to assess an organization's connectivity and paths options through the Internet backbone, including a user-friendly and insightful visual representation of results. CORIA is flexibly extensible in terms of novel data sets, graph metrics, and risk scores that enable further use cases. The performance of CORIA is evaluated by several experiments on the Internet graph and further randomly generated networks.