MANHASSET, NY — The Internet community can ill afford to rest on its laurels as far as DNS security is concerned. When it comes to the Domain Name System, the database architecture at the heart of the Internet infrastructure for the last 20 years, "the majority of the work to be done still lies ahead of us," said Paul V. Mockapetris who co-invented DNS.
Mockapetris received the 2003 IEEE Internet Award for his pioneering work on DNS on Tuesday (April1).
Mockapetris warned that efforts need to be made to improve its security especially since the October 2002 attacks on 9 of the Internet's 13 DNS root-name servers that contain the master domain list for DNS and the March 27th 2003 hacker attacks on the al-Jazeera network, part of which were DNS-based.
"The attacks illustrate that we need more secure and fail-safe models [for the Internet] in the future," he explained.
Despite attacks that portend graver security breaches, Mockapetris noted that The Internet Engineering Task Force has not yet hammered out a standard after nearly a decade of work.
With a security model for DNS in place, extensions could be built onto DNS that would relate to creating greater opportunities on the Internet including phone numbers for IP telephony, distribution of security keys and certificates, and no-call lists for telemarketers.
But without it, there is a "real opportunity for fraud" as the hacker community climbs the technology ladder and puts the 30 million people with web domains at risk, according to Mockapetris.
DNS is now an essential component of the Internet infrastructure that enables web URLs and sending of email messages by translating words into numbers needed to locate Internet resources.
Mockapetris is currently chairman and chief scientist at Nominum Inc. a provider of IP address infrastructure software (Redwood City, Calif.)
In 1983 Mockapetris invented the Domain Name System in collaboration with the late Jonathan B. Postel, a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute, a branch of the University of Southern California in Marina del Rey, Calif. He is currently Visiting Scholar at the Postel Center of Experimental Networking at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California.
