The Domain Name System (DNS) translates domain names such as americanscientist.org to an internet addresses as 93.184.216.119. Names are much easier memorized by humans than numbers in general. The Domain Name System was created at the University of California, Irvine in 1983!
Technology has evolved very rapidly throughout the years but the domain name system seems to have stayed more or less the same. The DNS system is based on a centralized design (client-server), where the user queries a name server which does the translation. The process generally follows this approach:
domain name system
While the current DNS system has served us well, it does have some issues: Million of domains are already taken. There is a strong dependency on the domain name server. If your ISP does not manage the domain name server well and you are not a technical minded person you may be stuck without access to the web. DDoS attacks can overwhelm domain name servers and make them unavailable for access. It is not immune to domain name takeover, see also this paper. And this paper. Could the DNS system be improved or could there be another system that solves some of these problems?
A few scientists proposed a system based on peer-to-peer technology has been created called P2DNS. The traditional DNS system would be a part of it. Their system relies on having multiple root name servers around the world (different roles in the decentralized network). An abstract of their paper is here.
Another system that has been proposed is called CoDoNS. You can read about it in this paper. Like the previous solution, it uses peer-to-peer technology. They claim it resists denial of service attacks, heals around failures, automatically distributes load, supports fast updates and adapts quickly to flash crowd.
The creator of Bitcoin had the idea to create a DNS system on top of blockchain technology. The blockchain is a public database with all transactions in the bitcoin system. The idea is while miners (entities that run heavy computations) create blocks (lists of sub-transactions) they could mine domain names too. The BitDNS project later became another project called Namecoin. The full idea has been described here.
If you have any interesting related projects or papers to share, please post in the comment section.