The Foundation of the Internet

A few years ago there were links flying around about the last page on the Internet. It’s kind of a joke, see, since it’s not really a linear thing, and usually said page would have some admonition to turn off your computer and go for a walk.

While there isn’t an end to the Internet, there is a beginning, and I stumbled upon it quite by accident tonight. I had heard about this some years ago but had never looked into it. Anyway, I came across the website for the Internet’s root servers at www.root-servers.org.

By a certain quirk of technology there are only 13 root servers that form the foundation of the internet. That page is a fascinating look into the pieces that hold the whole thing together. It has the physical locations, organizations and IP addresses of each of the named servers. They’re all over the world, and these days most of them are outside of the United States. There’s a bit of a workaround on the 13 servers that allows for multiple machines to act as one of the root servers. Such that, a couple of the servers have over 40 international locations where they are housed. But you can see the strong American flavor to the backbone — several root servers are run by the U.S. military, which is not surprising given the Internet’s history at DARPA.

Wikipedia has an entry about the root servers that has some more details about them. They also have a brief entry on distributed denial of service attacks on root nameservers. No one has ever been successful in attacking all of the root severs, but I think I must have heard about them after the 2002 attack mentioned in the Wikipedia article that brought nine of the 13 down. It’s kind of a strange thing to think that something as distributed and international as the Internet comes down to a few powerful servers running at its core. This huge thing suddenly seems very vulnerable. After a second attack in 2007 that lasted five hours, this chilling statement was issued, according to Wikipedia:

If the United States found itself under a major cyberattack aimed at undermining the nation’s critical information infrastructure, the Department of Defense is prepared, based on the authority of the president, to launch a cyber counterattack or an actual bombing of an attack source.

Technical note: I found it of some interest that not all of the root servers are listed as being IPv6 capable at this time. Kind of surprising given that the IPv4 address space could be exhausted within two years.