Never say never: Authoritative TLD nameserver-powered DNS amplification

DNS amplification attack is a significant and persistent threat to the Internet. Authoritative name servers (ANSes) of popular domains, especially the DNSSEC-enabled ones, give attractive leverage for attackers in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Particularly, the ANS list of top-level domains (TLD) is publicly accessible, including by would-be attackers, in the form of a root.zone file. In this work, we examine the potential of TLD...