User:Rouslan.kv/DNS:pro and cons

DNS or Domain Name System is a technology that allows mapping of easy to comprehend and memorize domain names to IP addresses of appropriate hosts. This suitable mechanism has a lot of advantages, but as any other system it has some issues, which in some cases may be very harmful to Internet users. One of the most significant drawbacks of the DNS is that it is vulnerable to attacks like DNS cache poisoning. Almost every user can easily become a victim of such attacks. Because the DNS lookup operation is hidden from an ordinal user it is very often hard to say if the requested corresponds the one that was obtained from the DNS server.

Another problem is limited ASCII character set that of the DNS addresses. Because of this it is not possible to use non-latin, umlauts and other characters in the domain names. But recently ICANN made it possible to simulate the chars that cannot be used in domain name using Punycode, which simply translates an entered string into a restricted character set understandable by DNS server.

One more issue is that it is possible to control the user's traffic withing a certain network. If a user does not know how to make a proper network setup he or she is potential victim of such DNS drawback. For example, it is possible to block a web resource by DNS and this as a matter of fact will really work for the waste majority of user withing a certain network. Of course if a user know how to fix the DNS setup or how to access the blocked resource by IP address it is not a problem. But again, the amount of such users is very small in comparison with the onces who does not care about the network setup.

Finally among the others there is a problem that Domain name registration system the opens doors for various kinds of frauds and scams like Domain slamming.

As a conclusion, DNS has a number of drawbacks but the waste majority of them, even the most dangerous can be prevented by either technical or legal measures.