  The Domain Name System (DNS) is part of critical internet infrastructure, as
DNS is invoked whenever a remote server is accessed (an URL is visited, an API
request is made, etc.) by any application. DNS queries are served in
hierarchical manner, with most queries served locally from cached data, and a
small fraction propagating to the top of the hierarchy - DNS root name servers.
Our research aims to provide a comprehensive, longitudinal characterization of
DNS queries received at B-Root over ten years. We sampled and analyzed a
28-billion-query large dataset from the ten annual Day in the Life of the
Internet (DITL) experiments from 2013 through 2022. We sought to identify and
quantify unexpected DNS queries, establish longitudinal trends, and compare our
findings with published results of others. We found that unexpected query
traffic increased from 39.57% in 2013 to 67.91% in 2022, with 36.55% of queries
being priming queries. We also observed growth and decline of
Chromium-initiated, random DNS queries. Finally, we analyzed the largest DNS
query senders and established that most of their traffic consists of unexpected
queries.
