In the recently held Global Network Technology Conference, Song Linjian, the director of Foresight Laboratory of China Future Internet Engineering Center, said that Internet is no longer a simple communication network, but has penetrated into every aspect of social life and production process, which needs risk control and management in each level.
Song Linjian said that the root server, including the entire DNS system, is the control center of the Internet, which is an important infrastructure and strategic resource and needs to be taken seriously. Due to historical reasons, the distribution of Internet root servers is not balanced, many servers rely on the anycast technology to expand mirrors of the root servers and users can solve the problems in performance and redundancy protection by accessing to the mirror servers. However, problems also exist in mirror servers, such as limited performance, may be paralyzed when attacked, influence the stabilization and operation of local network.
This is only a part of the problems, as the mirror servers are external infrastructures, China doesn’t have management authority, after the launch of Cybersecurity Law of the People's Republic of China, transborder data flow and security attracted considerable attention. "All the queries in root servers will carry complete data information. For example, if you visit a complete domain of Tencent, it will send the information to root server, and the leaked information can be statistically analyzed. The Cybersecurity Law emphasizes that public facilities need security and corresponding institutional protection, although the root server is far away from our lives, the potential security risks in infrastructure are worthy of our attention."
In the Action Plan for Promoting Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) Scale Deployment launched by General Office of the Communist Party of China and General Office of the State Council of China, it is clearly proposed to accelerate the update of application infrastructures, optimize flow scheduling ability and carry out IPv6-oritented new root server domain innovation and test; at the same time, it also mentioned that test and demonstration of IPv6 root servers are important, new root server domain system structure and corresponding technological innovation should be encouraged and supported, as well as build scale experimental verification network facilities and carry out application demonstrations.
China Future Internet Engineering Center got aware of this long ago, the Yeti Project led by it has completed setting of 25 IPv6 root servers in the world, 4 of which are set in China and broke the dilemma of no root server in China in the past. According to the latest statistics, the 25 IPv6 root servers have received queries from 2,391 recursive servers worldwide by August 2017, the majority of which are distributed in Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific region, it also reflects the global IPv6 network deployment and user development to a certain extent. Judging from the data flow, IPv6 root servers receive nearly 120 million queries in a day.
"The existing root server system cannot be deemed as useless, but there are flaws in cyber sovereignty, or the so-called network governance right." Song Linjian said, "After the launch of Yeti Project, there are some controversies. But we must firmly follow this path, build autonomous and controllable infrastructures and take new Internet-accessing countries into this system, we should make technical innovations in an open and transparent way, serve more countries and regions relying on technology promotion and system expansion."