Star Topology Disables the Web
The Internet can be represented as two graphs: one graph is the collection of pages and links that we know as the World Wide Web, and the other is a less visible network of hosts and service providers. The network of pages allows the average user to surf the web easily, but this second network of services facilitates all connectivity in the Internet. The importance of this second network became clear on Monday, September 10, 2012, when one of its nodes, GoDaddy, went down due to internal issues. GoDaddy is a web hosting service and possibly the Internet’s largest domain name registrar, meaning GoDaddy is a “phone-book” that translates human-friendly addresses like “www.example.com” into addresses that computers can connect to. When GoDaddy went down, users lost access to millions of websites, and content on unaffected websites that link to GoDaddy sites (such as images) failed to load. The attached article from news site ZDNet explains how downtime on one set of servers can affect the entire Internet. Though it has been confirmed that the downtime was not the result of a hack attack, the GoDaddy outage raises serious questions about the current way the Web is configured.
The GoDaddy outage exposes one of the dangers of current Internet topology – a good deal of the Internet’s nodes (websites) are connected in stars to a few central nodes – DNS servers like GoDaddy and VeriSign. The main problem of having a network made up of several stars is that the loss of a central node means the loss of a large section of the network. This means that for large portions of the Internet depend on the security of single nodes. Despite this problem, there are good reasons against for not using a more connected topology. Chief among these reasons is centralization of information. Internet service providers cannot correctly route requests from users if the information on how to do so is not centralized to a few locations. Another reason is bandwidth and the capability of computers. A graph of the Internet could not be fully connected because it would be impossible to store the routing data on every Internet-connected computer, let alone keep it all up-to-date. This is a situation where even though the current topology has problems, it is probably the best solution for the technology we have.
Source:
http://www.zdnet.com/anonymous-hacker-claims-godaddy-attack-outage-hits-millions-7000003925/
Scary to see that a hacker can prevent access to many sites. Maybe a all registrars should keep a copy of other registrar’s dns records.
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