Assessing Resilience in Authoritative DNS Infrastructure Supporting Government Services

Online government services are increasingly regarded as critical national functions, yet their supporting infrastructures remain vulnerable to outages caused by natural disasters, geopolitical tensions, and targeted attacks. Central to their operation is the authoritative Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure, the single source of truth that maps government domain names to service endpoints. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive assessment framework to systematically evaluate the operational resilience of authoritative DNS infrastructure per government service. Our first contribution develops a data schema that characterizes a domain's authoritative DNS infrastructure across four hierarchical levels: entire hosting infrastructure, server functionality, name servers, and hosting instances. Our second contribution identifies resilience attributes at their finest hierarchy across three operational phases, namely infrastructure placement, service configuration, and DNS record dispatch. Numerical scores are assigned and aggregated algorithmically to enable consistent and cross-domain comparisons. Lastly, we apply our method to government domains in six representative countries.