ABSTRACT
Within the Domain Name System (DNS), government domains form a particularly valuable part of the names-pace, representing trusted sources of information, vital services, and gateways for government personnel to engage in their duties. As the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded, governments' digital resources have become increasingly important to provide support to populations largely in isolation. The accessibility of these resources relies largely on the trustworthiness of the domains that represent them. In this paper, we conduct an extensive measurement study focused on the availability and legitimacy of DNS records in the authoritative nameservers of government domains for over 190 countries. Our measurements reveal that thousands of domains do not use replicated authoritative name-servers, as well as a substantial increase in the trend of more domains relying on a single third-party DNS services provider. We also find more than 1,000 domains vulnerable to hijacking due to defective delegations. Our work shows that although robust overall, the deployments of authoritative nameservers in government domains still contain a non-trivial number of configurations that do not meet RFC requirements, leading to poor performance and reduced reliability that may leave domains vulnerable to hijacking. © 2022 IEEE.