What do dns servers do




















FortiGate can be configured as a DNS server, giving users significant advantages. For instance, if an organization has a web server in their outward-facing services that employees and users from outside the company access, FortiGate can be used to cache queries. When users from within the company go to a website, their requests for the site get sent to a DNS server on the internet. This server then sends back either an IP address or a virtual IP address.

Once the company configures an internal DNS server using FortiGate, that request gets resolved internally using the internal IP address of the web server. Therefore, both inbound and outbound traffic are reduced, which means it takes less time to get to the site.

FortiGate can also act as a secondary DNS server. If a large company with several satellite offices wants to optimize their network performance, they could use FortiGate in this way. FortiGate also offers protection from DNS tunneling, a type of cyberattack where the data of other programs or protocol is encoded in DNS queries and responses.

This gives criminals the opportunity to pass stolen information or insert malware into DNS queries. DNS tunneling can also be used to engage in covert communication and slip through firewalls. Every device on the internet has an IP address, which other devices can use to locate the device.

Instead of memorizing a long list of IP addresses, people can simply enter the name of the website, and the DNS gets the IP address for them. An example of a DNS is that which is provided by Google. Skip to content Skip to navigation Skip to footer.

What Is DNS? Contact Us. DNS Definition. What is a DNS Server? After the resolver retrieves the request from the client, the resolver acts like a client itself. As it does this, it makes queries that get sent to the other three DNS servers: root nameservers, top-level domain TLD nameservers, and authoritative nameservers. Root nameservers : The root nameserver is designated for the internet's DNS root zone. Its job is to answer requests sent to it for records in the root zone.

It answers requests by sending back a list of the authoritative nameservers that go with the correct TLD. This way, if the underlying IP address changes, connectivity can still be established. Different record types are used for different purposes.

This can be used to provide both redundancy and load balancing. Instead, DNS is organized into smaller books or domains. Instead, DNS operates in a distributed fashion, with millions of servers around the world working together. An authoritative name server is where administrators manage server names and IP addresses for their domains. The basic concepts behind DNS are relatively straightforward, but over the years the technical side of things has grown increasingly complex.

A DNS query can be one of the following:. In a recursive DNS query, a DNS client will reach out to a server, which will in turn make upstream requests for the domain in question until a result is found.

The only set rule for a recursive query is that a result must be returned, if there is one. There can be a single or dozens of recursions.

The initial server or even the local DNS client may have a result already cached. A time-to-live TTL value governs how long one of these results can be cached; once the TTL has been reached, the client or server will need to look upstream for the results. The requester will continue this iterative process until it finds an answer or times out. As stated already, DNS is a distributed system, meaning that servers all over the world work together to maintain and deliver DNS records.

Different types of servers have different roles within the overall system:. Sometimes called a recursive resolver, a DNS recursor receives queries from DNS clients, responds if a hit is available in cache, or reaches out to a nameserver further up the chain.

Recursors are often run by Internet Service Providers, but its easy to change the DNS configuration of a computer to point to another source for performance, security, or privacy reasons.

As the name implies, root servers are the foundation from which the entire DNS infrastructure grows. TLD Name Servers are second in importance only to the root servers, as they know where to turn for answers about any domain within a given TLD. Attackers manage to insert false address records into the DNS so when a potential victim requests an address resolution for one of the poisoned sites, the DNS responds with the IP address for a different site, one controlled by the attacker.

Once on these phony sites, victims may be tricked into giving up passwords or suffer malware downloads. ICANN became aware of weaknesses in the communication between the DNS top-level, second-level and third-level directory servers that could allow attackers to hijack lookups. That would allow the attackers to respond to requests for lookups to legitimate sites with the IP address for malicious sites. These sites could upload malware to users or carry out phishing and pharming attacks.

This creates a chain of trust so that at each step in the lookup, the integrity of the request is validated. The growth of big data and analytics also brings a greater need for DNS management. The world got a good look recently at the sort of chaos weaknesses in DNS could cause with the discovery of a flaw in Windows DNS servers.

The potential security hole, dubbed SIGRed, requires a complex attack chain , but can exploit unpatched Windows DNS servers to potentially install and execute arbitrary malicious code on clients.

And the exploit is "wormable," meaning that it can spread from computer to computer without human intervention. The vulnerability was considered alarming enough that U. As of this writing, DNS is on the verge of one of its biggest shifts in its history. It's a move not without controversy. Paul Vixie, who did much of the early work on the DNS protocol back in the s, calls the move a " disaster " for security: corporate IT will have a much harder time monitoring or directing DoH traffic that traverses their network, for instance.

Still, Chrome is omnipresent and DoH will soon be turned on by default, so we'll see what the future holds. Keith Shaw is a former senior editor for Network World and an award-winning writer, editor and product reviewer who has written for many publications and websites around the world. Here are the latest Insider stories. If you visit one and the site looks off in some way—maybe the images are all different or the site's colors have changed, or menus don't look right, or you find misspellings hackers can be dreadful spellers —or you get an "invalid certificate" message in your browser, it might be a sign that you're on a faked website.

This ability to redirect traffic can be used for positive purposes. For example, OpenDNS can redirect traffic to adult websites, gambling websites, social media websites, or other sites network administrators or organizations don't want their users visiting. Instead, they may be sent to a page with a "Blocked" message. You can significantly increase your internet speed by switching DNS servers.

If you recently installed antivirus software, temporarily disable it to see if that helps. If that doesn't solve the problem, try switching DNS servers. The number 13 was chosen as a compromise between network reliability and performance.

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