Practical handling of DNS in the data plane

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a significant component of modern-day internet. Despite this fact, DNS traffic is mostly unencrypted, and as such a likely target for exploitation by malicious actors. The advancement of programmable switches presents researchers with the opportunity to explore DNS traffic from a new vantage point, without sacrificing network bandwidth. In spite of the incentive, DNS research in programmable switches has been scarce, owing to the difficulty in parsing DNS packets. We present a general solution to DNS packet parsing that can handle the vast majority of DNS packets (97%) using current hardware and can easily be scaled to parse all DNS packets as hardware improves. Our highly configurable solution can be adjusted to fit many distinct use cases. Additionally, we explore the challenges involved in parsing DNS packets and present common pitfalls appearing in previous research attempting to do so.