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Would this have been as much of a problem if DNS were used for its original purpose -- mapping relatively long-lived hostnames to somewhat less long-lived IP ad

by kijin 8y ago

Would this have been as much of a problem if DNS were used for its original purpose -- mapping relatively long-lived hostnames to somewhat less long-lived IP addresses -- instead of the other way around? Just as the inventors of zombifying pathogens in many stories didn't actually intend to cause the apocalypse, those who built these resolvers probably didn't anticipate that someone would create millions of single-use hostnames for tracking purposes. Yes, tracking. The article also blames trackers for a percentage of zombie queries, but they themselves have been creating all these meaningless hostnames to collect information from unsuspecting users. It's the exact same technique that malicious trackers often use to evade blockers. I wouldn't mind if resolvers recognized them as abusive and NXDOMAIN'd them altogether.

dredmorbius 8y ago
That is not in fact the original purpose of DNS. Network addresses were generally persistent. But the mechanism for distributingthe IP-hostname mapping had become unmanageable: - Host name to address mappings were maintained by the Network Information Center (NIC) in a single file (HOSTS.TXT) which was FTPed by all hosts [RFC-952, RFC-953]. The total network bandwidth consumed in distributing a new version by this scheme is proportional to the square of the number of hosts in the network, and even when multiple levels of FTP are used, the outgoing FTP load on the NIC host is considerable. Explosive growth in the number of hosts didn't bode well for the future. - The network population was also changing in character. The timeshared hosts that made up the original ARPANET were being replaced with local networks of workstations. Local organizations were administering their own names and addresses, but had to wait for the NIC to change HOSTS.TXT to make changes visible to the Internet at large. Organizations also wanted some local structure on the name space. - The applications on the Internet were getting more sophisticated and creating a need for general purpose name service. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034 A compilation of further specification documents is in the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System

by kijin 8y ago

dredmorbius 8y ago

That is not in fact the original purpose of DNS. Network addresses were generally persistent. But the mechanism for distributingthe IP-hostname mapping had become unmanageable: - Host name to address mappings were maintained by the Network Information Center (NIC) in a single file (HOSTS.TXT) which was FTPed by all hosts [RFC-952, RFC-953]. The total network bandwidth consumed in distributing a new version by this scheme is proportional to the square of the number of hosts in the network, and even when multiple levels of FTP are used, the outgoing FTP load on the NIC host is considerable. Explosive growth in the number of hosts didn't bode well for the future. - The network population was also changing in character. The timeshared hosts that made up the original ARPANET were being replaced with local networks of workstations. Local organizations were administering their own names and addresses, but had to wait for the NIC to change HOSTS.TXT to make changes visible to the Internet at large. Organizations also wanted some local structure on the name space. - The applications on the Internet were getting more sophisticated and creating a need for general purpose name service. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034 A compilation of further specification documents is in the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System