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Verisign braces for DNS onslaught
February 11, 2007
The internet is preparing itself for the onslaught of new web-enbled mobile phones, the uptake of internet television and an increasing number of phone calls made online.
The latest sign was Verisign’s announcement last week that it would spend more than $100m to increase its capacity 10-fold over the next three years.
Verisign, which runs the .com and .net domain names and directs internet traffic at two of the 13 ‘root’ servers that direct the world’s internet traffic, said it had had a "wake-up call" on capacity needs.
Industry forecasts estimate that global internet users will nearly double to 1.8bn by 2010. Much of this will come from the world’s 2bn mobile phone users buying internet-enabled phones. In countries like India and China, the mobile phone may be the primary way to access the internet.
In addition, households will be increasingly hooking up their TVs and home phones to the internet.
All this creates more traffic for Verisign to deal with. Each time anyone clicks on a .com or a .net website or checks email, that is another query for Verisign’s DNS servers to handle. But now, in addition to just individuals sending queries, the servers will be handling traffic each time someone changes channel on internet TV, or makes a voice over IP call.
Verisign currently handles 24bn queries a day and has capacity to handle up to 400bn. It is now ramping capacity to 4,000bn a day.
The scale of what it is doing is pretty astounding. In 2000 Verisign had servers in 8 locations. Over the last seven years that has slightly more than doubled to 20. Now Verisign are increasing that to 130 over three years.
Ken Silva, chief security officer at Verisign said the company was also building an increasing buffer against hackers. The more capacity there is the harder it is for hackers to overwhelm the system with denial of service attacks.
Last week hackers mounted the largest attack for four years on the root servers. Although it had the security guys and the techies scrambling, ordinary users barely noticed.
Hurrah for the robustness of the internet. But would the system stand up to an attack three years from now, if millions of Chinese and Indian smartphones were recruited into overwhelming botnet armies?
