With all the dependencies we are building to the Internet, I wondered if we should take a moment to address a potential point of failure. Could the management of the Domain Name System (DNS) be a loophole? There are conspiracy theories out there that say “yes”, but with simple Internet Protocol (IP) decoding schemes anyone can memorize their most important IP addresses.
In my lifetime, I’ve observed increased activity and usage of distributed protocols. The mentality of past governmental monarchies and corporate “tops-down” type organizations seem to be giving way to more prevalent use of progressive decentralization.
It’s easy to draw an analogy to Internet infrastructure and packet routing since data can reach its destination in a multitude of ways, but this phenomenon has been in practice for quite some time now. For example, President Eisenhower championed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. The highway system was built to provide different routes for military supplies and troop deployments in the event of an emergency, but it’s now routine for commercial truckers to use the system to modify their course based on traffic patterns.
This got me thinking about DNS servers and the inherent risk associated to the system overlay. At a high level, the purpose of DNS is to provide users of the world-wide-web with an easy to remember naming convention, but it is important to know that there is more to a domain name than meets the eye. Each name has an IP address (set of 4 numbers separated with dots) associated to it and the numbers are used by the mechanism routing the data you see.
For years we have used the phone book in much the same way and people often use this metaphor when describing DNS. Take a moment to imagine being in a situation where you weren’t able to access your electronic contact list or even a phone book. How many telephone numbers would you be able to remember?
Some conspiracy theories describe the government takeover of the DNS servers running the web. They point out the vulnerability of the system and show how an entire country could be removed from the web by merely deleting a suffix like (.de) from the name servers. So if the DNS servers or a subset of domain names were to disappear tomorrow what would you do? Could you remember any given IP to access your favorite news sites for emergency response instructions? If the answer is no, here’s an easy decoding scheme to use.
Have you ever used a vanity phone numbers like 1-800-got-milk? If you apply the same methodology you can sometimes come up with names that correlate to a specific IP address. Here’s an example:
The IP address for Viewmark is 216.38.205.162. This is not an easy number to remember, so let’s see what happens when we use the letters provided on a standard telephone to create a vanity name. We quickly realize that we’ll need to specify letters for the numbers 1 and 0, so let’s assume that (i=1) and (o=0) and all other numbers correspond as shown.
Here are two possible vanity names for the Viewmark IP. The first name is a yet to be invented fuel named Binduboline and I understand that it can be safely used as lip gloss, another idea is to generate a hypothetical video file structure for AOL called (aim.dv.aol.inc). I like the first name, but admit the latter contains the exact spacing of the IP address.
Now this article isn’t to say that we subscribe to any government conspiracy theories; however, in the event you ever find yourself offline because the DNS servers are not working properly, remember either Binduboline or bin.dv.aol.inc and you can be assured we’ll post links for you to relevant information on the internet using IP addresses.
