Untangling the web from DNS

  • Authors:
  • Michael Walfish;Hari Balakrishnan;Scott Shenker

  • Affiliations:
  • MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory(CSAIL), Cambridge, MA;MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory(CSAIL), Cambridge, MA;International Computer Science Institute(ICSI), Berkeley, CA

  • Venue:
  • NSDI'04 Proceedings of the 1st conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

The Web relies on the Domain Name System (DNS) to resolve the hostname portion of URLs into IP addresses. This marriage-of-convenience enabled the Web's meteoric rise, but the resulting entanglement is now hindering both infrastructures--the Web is overly constrained by the limitations of DNS, and DNS is unduly burdened by the demands of the Web. There has been much commentary on this sad state-of-affairs, but dissolving the ill-fated union between DNS and the Web requires a new way to resolve Web references. To this end, this paper describes the design and implementation of Semantic Free Referencing (SFR), a reference resolution infrastructure based on distributed hash tables (DHTs).