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A recent hack targeting popular cryptocurrency wallet MyEtherWallet.com successfully rerouted traffic from the site to a malicious Russian server for over two hours this past Wednesday. The hackers gained access to the funds of numerous users who unwittingly entered their credentials on the fake site, and made off with nearly $150,000 dollars worth of cryptocurrency. Unlike other crypto-related scams in recent memory, this one didn’t rely on a smart contract code exploit, social engineering scheme or fraudulent exchange, but an attack on DNS, a public protocol at the core of the open internet.
DNS in 20Â Seconds
DNS, the Domain Name System, is simply a registry that links complicated IP addresses to simple domain names. This is how your computer knows what server to fetch resources from when you type “google.com” into your address bar, and it’s why you don’t have to remember the IP addresses of all your favorite sites. The inevitable problem with such a system is that both the initial allocation of names — who gets “google.com” — and the ongoing ability to perform name lookups — who do you trust to resolve “google.com” to, say, “74.125.0.0” — are heavily dependent on centralized authorities.
The Problem with DNS
The hackers exploited this second attack vector, compromising Amazon’s Route 53 product. Among other services, this large, popular cloud provider retains an authoritative list of domain names and the content that is served to customers when visiting these domains. By breaching Amazon’s list, the attackers were able to redirect individuals who visited the MyEtherWallet domain to their own servers.
Some might dismiss this as a fairly trivial error, and a quickly remediated one at that. After all, there are many DNS providers, some of which have never been comprised. And in this case, the malicious redirects were stopped after only two hours. $150,000 seems like a small price, relative to the severity of the exploit. But what if those users who lost their funds didn’t have to rely on Amazon (or Google, or Cloudflare) not getting hacked to feel safe on the internet? Until quite recently, there was very little recourse for these issues, and such questions were largely moot. But with the advent of blockchain technology, decentralized solutions offer a potential way out that would put power back into the hands of users.
Is Blockchain the Answer?
ENS, or the Ethereum Name Service, is a DNS competitor that exists entirely on the Ethereum blockchain. Like DNS, ENS lets users associate unwieldy identifiers (Ethereum addresses) with human-readable identifiers (names ending in .eth). For example, I own the ENS name noah.zinsmeister.eth, as well as the address associated with this name. But unlike DNS, there’s no need to trust the back-end servers of whatever website is displaying my ENS name to also resolve my address correctly. Instead, this information is stored publicly and immutably in several smart contracts.
These smart contracts initially owned all names of the form *.eth; names are claimed through a sealed bid auction format. This imposition of scarcity over names is artificial, just like with DNS, but rather than relying on a variety of centralized, closed-source entities to manage name allocation and resolution, the Ethereum community uses the open-source ENS smart contracts as a single source of truth for names.
A New Paradigm
While it’s not yet possible to serve web content from an ENS name (typing “noah.zinsmeister.eth” into your address bar will not work), ENS sets the groundwork for a broad movement towards meaningful, trustless decentralization on the internet. By virtue of existing entirely on the blockchain, ENS is highly resistant to fraud and censorship. Name owners have complete control over the information that their name encodes, and that information is available from a single source of truth.
As ENS continues to grow, names will increasingly be used to identify applications, facilitate P2P payments, and broadly serve as a repository of online identities. That future may seem distant now, but in light of the recent hack and structural problems at the core of DNS, it’s something worth working toward.
Disclosure: I am not affiliated with ENS, though I am the proud owner of noah.zinsmeister.eth.
Can Blockchain Fix DNS? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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