Seeing Trouble: Security researcher Dan Kaminsky first spotted a basic vulnerability in the Internet last winter.
Credit: John Keatley

Features

The Flaw at the Heart of the Internet

  • November/December 2008
  • By Erica Naone

Dan Kaminsky discovered a fundamental problem and got people to care in time. We were lucky this time.

   

Dan Kaminsky, uncharacteristically, was not looking for bugs earlier this year when he happened upon a flaw at the core of the Internet. The security researcher was using his knowledge of Internet infrastructure to come up with a better way to stream videos to users. Kaminsky's expertise is in the Internet's domain name system (DNS), the protocol responsible for matching websites' URLs with the numeric addresses of the servers that host them. The same content can be hosted by multiple servers with several addresses, and Kaminsky thought he had a great trick for directing users to the servers best able to handle their requests at any given moment.

Normally, DNS is reliable but not nimble. When a computer--say, a server that helps direct traffic across Comcast's network--requests the numerical address associated with a given URL, it stores the answer for a period of time known as "time to live," which can be anywhere from seconds to days. This helps to reduce the number of requests the server makes. Kaminsky's idea was to bypass the time to live, allowing the server to get a fresh answer every time it wanted to know a site's address. Consequently, traffic on Comcast's network would be sent to the optimal address at every moment, rather than to whatever address had already been stored. Kaminsky was sure that the strategy could significantly speed up content distribution.

 

To read the entire article you must log in:

Most of our content — all daily news, blogs, and videos — is free. Magazine stories are paid. To read this story, you must have a subscription or you must use a reading credit. Registration to Technology Review is free and entitles registrants to three free reading credits.

Username or REGISTER
Password  
   
 
Advertisement

MAGAZINE

Can We Build Tomorrow's Breakthroughs?

Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.

Videos

Meet 2011 TR35 Winner Jesse Robbins

More

Advertisement

Technology Review Lists

TR50

Our list of the 50 most innovative companies, including the following:

Calxeda

SpaceX

Goldwind Science and Technology

Amazon.com

More

Advertisement

Facebook

Advertisement