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Caching Torrent files in DNS
bodin writes "This is a proof of concept version of BitTorrent where the torrent files are transported over DNS. This will of course bog down BIND servers all over the planet. Everyone should be thankful that the files are not sent over DNS."
Seriously. I don't pretend to understand 100% of the technology involved, but it seems pretty clear even to me that:
- DNS servers, as the name implies, are for serving DNS information.
- For information to be propagated at a good speed, we don't want DNS servers to be bogged down.
- If we start using DNS servers to send information larger than the usual DNS information, we bog them down.
That isn't to say that I think BitTorrent cacheing isn't possible. I just don't think it's a good idea to use existing DNS servers for it, although perhaps something could be built on similar technology, or dedicated Torrent users could run their own DNS servers if they're that determined to do something so bandwidth-intensive..."It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." -- Zork
BitTorrent already requires fixed servers for operation (the "trackers"), and serving torrent files from the same trackers isn't a terrible burden. Why on earth would someone want to abuse DNS for this purpose?
Yesterday night when i could not sleep i thought of what fun i could do with one of the most
distributed database in the world. The DNS!
yeah its fun fucking up the DNS for everyone, haha i laugh everytime a virus wipes out half the net or your hardrive, its fun ruining other peoples stuff, its cheap like you say right ?
DNS is being used to exchange the Torrent files, which are small, not the data itself, which is large.
The Torrent files are indexes that tell your BitTorrent program where and how to get its data.
This sounds very useful, since what was missing from the BitTorrent network was a way of distributing cached Torrent files, and this is exactly what DNS provides.
Remains to be seen whether it actually works, but it's a neat concept.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
If you read the article and know anything about DNS, you can see that he is splitting the file into 126 byte segments and storing the parts in TXT records of individual hosts. The host naming scheme is quite clever, I might add.
The goal is to offload the duty of serving up the files from the download servers to an existing distributed network. He even mentions that the DNS servers caching these records would consume massive amounts of memory, and then (like a spammer) blows it off as "its [memory] not that expensive today anyway."
If this is actually implemented on a wide scale, DNS administrators will simply stop caching TXT records, putting the load right back on the original download server where it belongs. Or worse, they may stop caching records altogether, which could only lead us all down the path of chaos, death and destruction.
I agree that it's clever, but like a deadly virus, not something that should leave the lab on a large scale.
news doesn't exist to just publish the good ideas, unless you really /want/ censorship
Using DNS to cache a dozen or two kilobytes (or less, or more) where it's only meant to handle a few BYTES is likely to cause all sorts of problems.
This guy used DNS because it "caches" the data... Yeah, so what?
Why not use a cache that's built for large quantities of data? I don't know, oh something like, maybe SQUID?
They are not talking about transfering data directly through the DNS channels. They are talking about using the DNS system to replace the tracker server. In reality they are both doing basically the same thing -- they are both mearly creating an abstration that points to the actual electronic address where are resource is located.
While I am not really to hot about tracking through BIND I do think that the two protocols can learn from each other. What makes DNS so great is that it is a distributed system which balances the load more or less evenly among connected nodes but the system is useless in dealing with dynamic IP, NAT, intermittent connections, etc. that effect most work stations at the fringe of the Internet. This is were P2P technologies like bittorent are starting to excel. Taken together these technologies could create a new hybridized standard that will once again allow workstations to be a presence on the Internet by creating a new Universal Resource Locator (URL) that will transend the barriors of DHCP, NAT, etc. and reinforce the advantage of distributed hierchies to peer to peer.
Well.... The files are small and you have to do a DNS lookup *anyway* to reach the site they are on so maybe it's not toally stupid.... But it's probably a very bad idea to encourage this kind of thing
Sig is taking a break!
From TFA: "due the nature of the DNS it *CACHES* the entries"
No, that's BIND. And a BIND zonefile is just that: a BIND zonefile. All this is about BIND, not DNS. It does not work "over" or "with" or "through" DNS.
It's not clever either. More like abusing other people's resources.
I guess one could sarcastically say thanks for the proof of concept, real good job. But then again, its better they did it and let everyone know it could be done, rather than having to find out about it 'in the wild'. I just hope its easy to prevent.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Mod Parent Up.
He's right about DNS only distributing the very small torrent file and not the actual data the torrent points to, and since DNS is a hierarchy of caching servers the load ain't going to be very bad either, it should scale nicely so that any high-demand torrent will quickly end up cached at the users' local DNS servers.
Plus, the idea of applying lessons learned from the caching hierarchy of DNS and the dynamic join/leave handling of trackers and other p2p to come up with a better mousetrap for data distribution has merit.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
" DNS is well designed to cache for well defined amounts of time."
It's amazing to me how well designed the DNS infrastructure is. Just the right balance of decentralization and authority. Unlike P2P systems it relies on root servers to provide an authoritive content but it also provides a completely decentrized administration infrastructure.
I am shocked that DNS or the ideas behind it have not been used for all kinds of things.
War is necrophilia.
Its design supports more networking addressing schemes than TCP/IP. These Bittorrent files are just addresses one/two abstraction levels from raw ip addresses. No big deal. You all sound like a bunch of whiney old ladies. Death of DNS! News at 11! The impact this will have on the DNS system you couldn't even measure with an electron microscope so just calm down.
Maybe you understand this already and maybe not. The load on the dns servers wouldn't really be that large, only the .torrent file is distributed via dns, not the data itself.