[CSC2231] Paper Review: Serving DNS using a Peer-to-Peer Lookup Service

This paper proposes to implement DNS service with Chord. By using a DHT
technique, the DNS service automatically inherits the fault tolerance
and load balancing characteristics. However, the authors do not
recommend DDNS at this point because of its latency and the feasibility
to deploy DDNS to all hosts.

DNS is a large scale lookup service that all Internet hosts depend on
it. This is probably the best application to demonstrate the power of
DHT: scalability, resilience to failures, and so forth.

I find that this particular implementation has two more shortcomings
besides those described in the paper because it requires all hosts to
participate in the Chord ring. One, hosts must expose a port to the
Internet so that it can join the Chord ring. This is not only a security
concern for protected machines, but also preventing hosts NAT'ing behind
a LAN from using DNS. Two, it exposes all hostnames that are used only
in internal networks. Under conventional DNS, hostnames of an internal
network can be stored at a local authoritative name server only
servicing the internal network. DDNS requires these records to be
distributed, allowing others to view the network structure of this
internal network.
Received on Thu Nov 10 2005 - 08:44:51 EST