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Dan Kaminsky Suggests Having Fun with DNS
boogahsmalls writes "A few weekends ago Dan Kaminsky of scanrand fame presented some pretty cool ideas involving DNS that made plenty of heads spin at the LayerOne Technology Conference. Some of his concepts included Voice over DNS and storing Knoppix in a DNS cache. He's also apparently got a couple new tools in the pipe including a scanrand based DNS scanner and a visualization suite. Could another version of Paketto Keiretsu be in the works?" (OpenOffice.org does a great job of opening the PowerPoint slideshow.)
I'd rather my dns just work.
It's a pity most of the slashdot crowd won't understand any of its technical merits at all.
Mark this as flamebait if you will, but come back in a while and read the comments, I promise there will be hardly any discussion of the paper.
Dan is obviously a very smart guy, I like his ideas about using http tunnel (it's a great program), I'm going to have to give some of these ideas a work out!
Bob
Most people are lucky if DNS just works without major headaches.
I could swear BIND and its config file is considered, along with Sendmail, one of the most convoluted programs in Internetdom. It, again along with Sendmail, is historically also one of the most bug-ridden and exploited.
And now someone is suggesting futzing around with it?! Why not just change your domain to "rootmeplease.com" and get it over with?
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
He does have a point.
In other words kid, don't fuck with us old guys or we'll show you who knows shit!
Ok, so let's do this:
We've got the Kaminsky protocol connected to the
DNS protocol
the DNS protocol's connected to the
UDP protocol
The UDP protocol's connected to the
IP protocol
Oh hear the word of the inefficient!
The second verse is left as an exercise for the reader. Please keep in mind that writing another verse is somewhat more productive than implementing the aforementioned Kaminsky protocol.
-Adam
What part of the word lightweight don't you understand?
OK this is pretty OT as well but I'll have to agree to many people have no depth. But in reviewing a canidate it's generaly better to try and figure out how quickly they can get some depth. And knowing a little bit of everything and being able to go deaper quickly can make you a great CTO :) or consultant (IE not a temp staffer being called a consultant)
No sir I dont like it.
It is indeed a thought experiment -- but one that's led to some interesting stuff. Voice over DNS was actually a really surprising hack -- here you have a globally deployed caching system, sometimes several levels deep, that actually has the capacity to host the minimal bitrate for a minimally compressed voice link.
:-)
There's millions of servers out there that we can interface with -- what's the impact of that? If nothing else, it's fun to be playing with something other than TCP headers
--Dan
P.S. A broom can be used to sweep the floor -- or to knock something out of a tree, or to scare off a wild animal, or to burn for heat. There's something to be said for separating common uses from "inherent purposes". HTTP was certainly never designed to host as much dynamic content as it does now!
Yes, the ability to learn is important. But just as important is the ability to say "I don't know." If there are two candidates where I feel that either has the same learning capacity, but one is more honest about their skills, I'll pick the more honest one because I know where they stand. I have enough know-it-all-can-do-everything-bow-before-me types around me already who manage just to make more work for me later when they couldn't actually do what they said they could do. And firing people is at best unpleasant.
Wow.