P2P DNS Infrastructure

Recent events have put the neutrality of the Internet in question. The Internet as we know today depends heavily on the DNS (Domain Name System) to translate domain names into IP addresses of hosts where information is located. The problem is that DNS has a central authority, making it easy for an entity to arbitrarily and effectively shut down web sites and other services that depend on DNS. The Internet as a free, independent, and censorship-less communication medium can only exist if DNS were government-independent.

The P2P Challenge Task (CT) was open to students of the FS11 semester of the P2P Systems and Applications lecture. Its goal was to design and implement an independent, P2P DNS infrastructure. The application acts as a name server running on PCs of voluntaries who collaborate on keeping the service. This means that every peer will listen on port 53 and "speak" DNS to resolvers (e.g. web browsers). No central authority is present, that is, the system will suffer no influence from ICANN or governments. Conflicts must be solved by the peers themselves (for example, using voting or a web of trust). Assumptions must be made regarding who has the right to use which name, but it must not be trivial for a single peer to hijack a domain name it has no right to (although more complex attacks don't have to be considered). Every peer must run the same software, although some peers may become more trusted than others.

Though there were some requirements to be met, each of the five groups was free to choose its own approach and solutions to each problem involved. For more information on the task, please visit the FS11 P2P Challenge Task page

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Please find a table with authors, reports, and downloads at the FS11 P2P Challenge Task Reports and Source Code section.