GuidanceNational Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)Information Security
The Internet is the world's largest computing network, with hundreds of millions of users. From the perspective of a user, each node or resource on this network is identified by a unique name - the domain name - such as www.nist.gov. However, from the perspective of network equipment that routes communications across the Internet, the unique identifier for a resource is an Internet Protocol (IP) address, such as 172.30.128.27. To access Internet resources by user-friendly domain names rather than IP addresses, users need a system that translates domain anme to IP addresses and back. This translation is the primary task of the Domain Name System (DNS).
The DNS infrastructure is made up of computing and communication entities that are geographically distributed throughout the world. There are more than 250 top-level domains, such as .gov and .com, and several million second-level domains, such as nist.gov and ietf.org. Accordinaly, there are many name servers in the DNS infrastructure, which each contain information about a small portion of the domain name space. The DNS infrastructure functions through collaboration among the various entities involved. The domain name data provded by DNS is intended to be available to any computer located anywhere in the Internet.
RSS Syndication