Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Dan Kaminsky Suggests Having Fun with DNS

Posted by timothy on from the bits-is dept.

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.)

8 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. No thanks, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'd rather my dns just work.

  2. Great Article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:Great Article by wwest4 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The presentation is intriguing, but like any typical slideshow, lacking in specifics (things like "stuff=cool" aren't terribly telling). Unless you already know the DNS pretty well, it would be hard to infer the nitty-gritty of the talk from this ppt without thinking pretty hard about it, and you shouldn't fault a diverse group of geeks from different nerd realms for not being DNS power users.

  3. Crazy! by chill · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  4. Yea baby! by stienman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  5. Re:Some of this stuff really makes alot of sense by strabo · · Score: 4, Insightful
    DNS already has a mature, stable, and lightweight caching mechanism in place. Why not use it?

    What part of the word lightweight don't you understand?

  6. Re:Win2k DNS by silas_moeckel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  7. Re:Some of this stuff really makes alot of sense by Effugas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!