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Page 36 Kim et al. J Surveill Secur Saf 2020;1:34-60 I http://dx.doi.org/10.20517/jsss.2020.14

Figure 1. Map of Internet disabled in US by the Dyn Attack

2. BACKGROUND
2.1 DNS
DNS is an Internet system to map alphabetic domain names to numeric IP addresses [1,2,18] . In this paper,
DNS is defined as the following:

Service: DNS is a name resolution service. The domain name can be matched to the IP address through
DNS.

System: DNS is a distributed database system for the naming service as technical support. The DNS servers
are located globally.

Server (Structure): DNS name servers are organized in a top-down tree structure to support an efficient
naming service.

2.1.1 DNS history
In 1983, domain names were first translated to addresses through a local service, managed by the Operating
System (OS). The host file in the OS stored these translations. Initially, only about 15 organizations used
a single network, so keeping these files consistent and updated was straightforward, but not scalable.
To address this inefficiency, the Stanford Research Institution Network Information Center (SRI-NIC)
developed a new naming mechanism. The previous name service within the OS was transformed into
a system that was managed and deployed collectively by SRI-NIC. The host file containing translation
information (host name and numeric address) was hosted online by SRI-NIC and could be downloaded
over FTP. However, as the Internet grew the difficulties of keeping the file updated, and the size of the file,
became impractical. This resulted in poor search performance and traffic bottlenecks. To overcome these
drawbacks, a new type of name system was introduced in 1987 as the IETF Request for Comments (RFC)
[2]
1034 . The DNS system was standardized and widely implemented and started to manage domain names
on hierarchically-organized servers, growing into the current DNS system.