At this point, it’s hard to imagine life without the Internet, at least in the developed world. But buried underneath the breathtaking Web applications and streaming media that we use on a daily basis, the actual software that makes the Internet work is starting to show its age.
When DNS was created in 1983, it was designed to be helpful and trusting–it’s directory assistance, after all. It was a time before hacker conventions and Internet banking. Plus, there were only a few hundred servers to keep track of.
The Internet engineering community is grappling with what to do about a serious flaw in the DNS discovered this summer, and the ongoing debate brings to mind a famous quotation from Voltaire: “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
Dan Kaminsky, the security researcher who first sounded the alarm that the entire Internet was in grave danger due to a widespread vulnerability, has revealed in front of a packed audience at the Black Hat security conference the details behind the initial subterfuge–and potential problems that could still pick apart the Web world as we know it.
About two weeks ago, we covered the release of a DNS security fix meant to patch a vulnerability in the system that matches domain names with IP addresses. The flaw had been discovered by security researcher Dan Kaminsky some months earlier but, at the time, details on the exploit were being kept secret.
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