maDNS1
The Domain Name System has more secrets than one could even imagine.
5th of February, 2021
City of Dodvhall, United Riripublic
Cold winter morning. Vladimir practically flew intto the office, more than happy to escape the biting cold. The large "Riri Inovacijos ir Technologijos" sign and the sleek, minimalistic RIT logo - a yellow, upside-down triangle—greeted him at the reception, along with Jack, or Jackie, as everyone called him.
"Good morning, quite a blizzard, huh?" Jackie asked with a smile, his hair still a little wet from the snow as well.
"Don't you say..." Vladimir replied, walking up to the door that separated the reception area from the inner offices of RIT. He pulled out his keycard, glanced at it once again. "Internal Systems & Management Department" - landing a job at RIT's ISMD was quite an achievement in itself, but holding up to its standards for years? That's what someone would call a "next-level achievement".
Sliding the card into the reader with cold, shaky hands, Vladimir frowned as it blinked red. "Access denied", a robotic voice kept repeating from a tiny speaker in the reader.
He came up to the reception desk, leaned onto it asking "Jack, mind calling in security? My damn card is not working again." he said, clearly annoyed by it, "third time this week, can you imagine?".
Jackie begins tapping on his tablet as he listens. "Third time? That's a new personal best." he says, as if he congratulates Vladimir, "Jokes aside, we got a new procedure to speed things up" Jackie replied calmly. "Did you submit the biometrics when applying?"
"Yup, we all got fingerprinted."
Jackie straightened up. "Splendid! Put your hand on the scanner please, I'll confirm with security to issue you a new card."
Vladimir complied, placing his hand on the scanner and waiting.
"A-a-a-and we got a match! Security should give us a green light in a couple of minutes," Jackie said, filling out a form on his tablet.
"Well, that's convenient. No longer running between floors and being escorted through the entire building?" Vladimir asked, raising an eyebrow as if he doesn't believe his ears.
"A thing of the past, rest assured! Security got tired of dealing with hundreds of requests for new cards."
"And they put this job on you..."
Jackie shrugged. "Yes, but it's not that bad. Making a new card every now and then isn't that difficult. At least it's definitely less difficult than escorting a person to the security office every time" he said, still smiling. "Comes with the added benefit of keeping things fresh, you know?"
Vladimir let out a sigh, "If you like keeping things fresh, give ISMD a shot. We've got all the 'fresh' things in the world, it seems."
"I'm afraid the matters of ISMD are off limits to me" said Jackie.
"They most likely are," Vladimir left out a chuckle.
In a couple seconds, Jackie handed him a shiny new card trading it for the old one. "There you go! This one's good as new."
"Thanks Jack, take care," Vladimir said, sliding the card into the reader once again. This time the system had mercy on him and blinked green, granting him access.
It was still a little early, so the office wasn't what you would call "busy" by any stretch of imagination. Vladimir quickly walked over to his workplace, fired up his work laptop and logged into the RIT systems. He still had half-an -hour to spare before work formally starts, just enough to bring himself up to date and waste some free time.
Vladimir started scrolling through a bunch of issues on the RIT's Rira board to find something quick and simple to spend some free time on. That's how people in IT are, they do computer stuff for both work and fun.
"What do we have here? A printer in the lobby spitting out documents of unknown origin..." Vladimir was a little puzzled. Printers are not connected to The Internet, so the origin should be easy to trace within the local network.
"Uhhhh..." he muttered, "Ah, might as well.". He began reading the task description while fidgeting a pen. It seemed trivial, stuff like this happens around the office every now and then, thanks to pranksters and script kiddies on the corporate WiFi. The process was straightforward and almost etched into his memory at this point: check the print logs, trace the IPs, block if necessary.
"Multiple documents sent by 198.41.0.4, which is... Not local and not from any of our subnets... Huh...?" he whispered quietly. He leaned closer to the screen, slightly furrowing his eyebrows. "What's the PTR record for this thing either way?" he thought and went into the terminal and typed dig -x 198.41.0.4 to get the PTR record for an IP. "Wha..." Vladimir said, visibly puzzled.
;; ANSWER SECTION:
4.0.41.198.in-addr.arpa. 844 IN PTR a.root-servers.net.
a.root-servers.net. sent a print request to their internal network? This seems impossible, "this must be some sort of a trick" he said. He called a colleague of his over - Kacper. He was "The Guy" for weird networking shenanigans, knew the company's networks in and out.
He walked up to Vladimir, greeted him, cheerful and condescending at the same time. "Check this out, you are the networking guy for all it's worth, should be right down your valley," - Vladimir said. Kacper quickly glanced through the print logs and the terminal on the screen.
Kacper smirked, crossing his arms and leaning back against the wall. "What is it?" - Kacper said - "Root DNS servers sending us documents to pri..." - he paused. Kacper started laughing, almost hysterically, "Holy, you always find a new way to pull a joke on us don't you?" he said as he wiped his forehead. As Vladimir tried to explain that this is not a joke, Kacper just laughed louder and louder.
Kacper pushed himself away from the wall, leaning over Vladimir slightly. "Alright mate, root servers sending us print jobs? Seriously? Sure, call me when the printer gets an AXFR request," Kacper turned away for a second before turning back and adding "Wait, no, call me when the printer fulfills an AXFR request for a root server," before going away laughing quietly.
"But..." - Vladimir said to what is now an empty place, "No wonder no one likes this guy."
He tried investigating a little further, turning back with nothing, and went to work on more urgent issues. Hours passed, issues came back as resolved, and with a good chunk of the work done he signed off, quickly forgetting about the printer as well.
6th of February, 2021
City of Dodvhall, United Riripublic
Early morning, so early in fact that Jack didn't show up yet. Vladimir is brewing up a cup of tea in the lobby to kick start the day.
Technically the work day starts in an hour, but might as well get into it a little earlier, the servers were misbehaving must more than usual in the B-0B cluster.
Then a familiar sound interrupted the silence in the office. A printer, the same one he tried to investigate earlier, the one getting documents from, and he couldn't believe he was even thinking this, a root DNS server.
He walked up to the printer to find a couple sheets with text in large font printed all over them. A thought rushed into his head, "reading random documents from printers is against the company policy", but curiosity got the best of him. Vladimir walked up to the printer, took the sheets and started reading...
"Brothers and Sisters. For too long have we lived in the chaos, blind to see the truth that lies behind every website we open, every request we send, every query we make... You, living in this awfully fragmented world, have forgotten about the foundation."
"That's... new," he muttered while looking onto the printer and the sheets while being what one would describe as "audibly quiet". He grabbed the sheets, his cup of tea and went to his workplace.
"Do you think DNS, something we call the "Domain Name System" was created by us? Do you think it was born from human ingenuity, just another protocol among million others? No, it was not." - he read aloud, almost as if he is some sort of a cult leader trying to persuade people to join. Or a crazy conspiracy theorist. Or both, most of the time you can't have one without another.
"You might've heard stories ICOULDD and others told you, you might've seen the RFCs and now you think that I am a mad man, which I assure you, I am not." - at this point Vladimir briefly questioned his own sanity, but there definitely was something in the absurdity of this situation.
Then Vladimir had an idea, he was a member of "The Group", a channel for communication with the the smartest and stupidest people he knew. But one thing he was sure in - they will believe him, they saw weirder RFD-quality-worth events.
RIRINET Communication Systems
RIRI Inovacijos ir Technologijos (C) 2021
Attempting M-Link Key Authorization (MLKA3),
please input your password when prompted.
m-link-vapronva-sussykey password: m**********h
[ DONE ] Fetching data...
[ DONE ] Fetching user preferences...
Welcome back, vapronva.
Please, select a communication channel to proceed.
> /enter pinned:4
[ CHANNEL: THE GROUP ]
Online members: kc, andorvini
Offline members: thispilot, rferee, gfxv
- Beginning of chatlog for Feb6-2021
08:21 vapronva > guys
08:21 vapronva > might have something for you to look at
08:22 kc > what is it?
08:22 vapronva > ever heard of a root dns server sending
documents to printers?
08:22 kc > what?
08:22 vapronva > take a look yourself
08:22 = vapronva uploaded prt-lobby-log.txt
08:23 = kc downloaded prt-lobby-log.txt
08:23 kc > excuse me
08:23 kc > w h a t
08:24 vapronva > yeah...
08:24 kc > @rferee take a look at that
vapronva@net.rit >And then, the chat went silent. Which makes sense, most of The Group members were still deep in their dreams that Morpheus crafted for them. Until then vapronva had a choice between getting back to fixing Wordpress instances that broke because of crappy MySQL migrations or keep on reading. "You know what? At least this is entertaining and I don't have that much time either" he said slamming his work laptop shut.
"The DNS was not created, I would even say it was never created in a way we think. When we decided to move away from that one large hosts.txt and conceived DNS we didn't create or conceive it. We simply tore away the veil...". His light reading was interrupted by Kacper walking into the office. Vladimir glanced over to the clock, it was 8:30 already and the work day has officially begun. And as usual, the day starts with the automated monitoring system calling in with a brief.
"Good morning, VLADIMIR," the robotic voice said over the phone. "Yeah, yeah..." he thought, distracted by how his name was pronounced in a different voice than the rest of the message. The voice continued, "Thank you for your devotion to R I T. Today, you have been assigned SEVEN issues requiring immediate attention. We wish you a productive day!"
Something was off about this brief, but he couldn't quite pin point what exactly... Ah, details, or lack thereof. Usually the brief includes what are the issues related to, what client the service belongs to, this one just said "seven issues requiring immediate attention".
Kacper walked up to Vladimir, grim in the mornings as usual. "Ay, figured out the printer issue?" he asked, barely able to hold back his laughter.
He was never what you’d call a nice guy. Kacper had a hidden talent for finding amusement in his colleagues, and while no one liked him too much, they liked him just enough to keep him around.
Vladimir hesitated for a moment, then finally said "Think it was a fluke", just as a familiar notification chimed, telling him to check The Group.
[ CHANNEL: THE GROUP ]
Online members: kc, andorvini, rferee
Offline members: thispilot, gfxv
09:32 = rferee entered the channel.
09:32 rferee > I have warned you.
09:32 = rferee left the channel.
09:35 kc > well that's new
09:36 kc > and he blocked me in DMs to
09:37 vapronva > let me try messaging him
> /find @rferee
[0] DM: @rferee
> /enter 0
RIRINET: User not found or you are not allowed to message this user.
> enter pinned:4 --history=false
[ CHANNEL: THE GROUP ]
Online members: kc, andorvini
Offline members: thispilot, gfxv
09:39 vapronva > blocked me as well
09:40 vapronva > @andorvini mind paying him a visit in his office?
09:44 andorvini > As soon as i get to the office on my brichka.
vapronva@net.rit >Andorvini, or Anton, was one of the founders of M-Link along with Max – better known as rferee – who works full-time as the Head of Software Development. Anton's prized possession which he calls his "brichka", was a sleek ZiL 600 SIL, a car he held dear. Though his fortune could buy him tens of thousands of cars just like this one, this one was special. He bought it on the same day M-Link acquired the status of Free International Corporation with Territorial and Limited Legal Independence, a fancy way of saying it was, de jure, a sovereign state only bound by some international liaws.
"Ah, the good old days..." was the thought that constantly crossed Anton's mind as he drove this marvel of design and engineering.
As Anton pulled up to the M-Link office, he went through security with Yura, his good friend and the chief of god-knows-which-at-this-point department. They went to the elevator, Yura quickly swiped his card and the elevator took off. Interestingly enough, it started going straight to the penthouse there Anton's and rferee's offices are located.
"Whoa, since when are you authorized to enter the head offices?" Anton asked Yura, visibly confused.
"Well, I have a meeting with Max scheduled for 10 o'clock," Yura replied.
"Huh, I thought he never schedules meetings before noon. That's usually when he starts with all his 'be there in 10' messages." Anton paused for a moment, his expression shifting. "Unless something is seriously wrong... Wait, when did he schedule the meeting?"
"Ten minutes ago. Good thing I was already in the office," Yura said.
"Something's not right..." Anton said before the silence resumed, only occasionally interrupted by the elevator sounds.
Ding! The voice in the elevator announced "Floor 69, Top Executive" as the doors opened. Anton walked up to the door to Max's office, slid his keycard in and the door opened. "Open sesame" - Anton chuckled and gestured to Yura inviting him in first.
Max sat at the table, sifting through financial reports, internal presentations and a bunch of metrics. "Yeah, Alice, I need the old one revoked and a new key and sig issued as soon as poss- Sorry, got visitors, call me back with any updates" he said, cutting the call short as he noticed Yura and Anton walking in.
"Good morning. Anton, I left some files in the e-docs for you to go through. I need folders one through seven signed on every page - assuming you agree with the operational changes, of course," Max rattled off, his eyes still glued to the documents. He was in what he called "full work mode", the closest thing to this is probably listening to someone rap through a checklist.
"That’s about the creation of the AS Department, right?" Anton asked.
"Yup. We discussed that half a year ago. Now that the project #215-225 is finish-"
"What department?" Yura interrupted.
"Highly classifi-" Max began, only for Anton to cut him off.
"You’ll see sooner or later, trust me. But that department is going to take M-Link to a whole new level." Anton said, clearly proud of his work.
"Holy, you might as well head our marketing department with speeches like that," Max said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. He quickly refocused. "Alright, let’s get back to biz. What’s up Yura? Anything you needed?" His voice a mix of impatience and a desire to send them off so he could return to his work.
"You asked me to come at 10 today - literally 20 minutes ago," Yura said, holding up his phone.
Max finally looked up from his papers, confusion crossing his face. "I don’t do meetings before 12. I think everyone knows about that at this point."
Yura frowned and opened the M-Link Employee Calendar app on his phone, only to find the meeting entry - scheduled by Max personally - was gone. As if it had never existed.
Max’s expression shifted to one of annoyance. "So...?" he asked, trying to make sense of the situation.
"I... I’m sorry. It must’ve been some sort of mistake," Yura stuttered, clearly perplexed by what had just happened.
"Nah, don’t worry about it," Max said in a friendlier tone. "We’ve had some weird glitches with our scheduling system. Might’ve been a bug."
Max leaned back in his chair and glanced at Anton. "Alright, Yura, would you mind giving me and Anton a minute? Gotta discuss something."
Yura nodded in acknowledgement and left the room shutting the door behind him.
"So, what's up with the ominous tone and warnings?" Anton asked.
Max looked away from the papers and gave him a puzzled glance. "Ominous tone and warning? Oh, I've got one for you right now: 'You shall perish if we don't finish #215-225 in time-e-e-e...'" he said, drawing out the words like a ghost before bursting into laughter.
"On a serious node, the hell are you talking about?" he added, his tone shifting to curiosity.
"You left The Group at 9:32 today after saying, 'I have warned you,' or something like that," Anton replied in all seriousness.
Max muttered "Uhhhh...", and paused, thinking for a moment, "I am not exactly sure what are you talking about, but I lost my auth key, maybe someone found it and decided to pull a prank on us?"
Max quickly analyzed the situation, "But that seems like such a waste of potential, if I found an auth key of a M-Link exec... Oh boy, I'd have the time of my life" he said quietly chuckling to himself, his attention shifting to papers on his table again.
"Anyway, I already asked Alice to make me a new one, should be ready soon, I'll take a look at the chat after that, alright?" Max said, sounding as though he was trying to strike a deal.
"I'll get to work then" Anton replied, already preparing to leave.
"Take care, try to send me the signed docs by 11" Max said with a hint of begging in his voice.
"Oh screw off" Anton shot back, his expression still dead serious. The tone is what always gave him away though, unmistakably joking.
"You screw off" Max said playing into the joke as Anton disappeared through the office door. Max smiled softly, confident that he'd have the signed documents on his desk by 11, best thing about working with Anton is that he holds up to his promises. "Definitely can learn some stuff from this guy" Max thought, before sinking into his "full work mode" again.
[ CHANNEL: THE GROUP ]
Online members: kc, vapronva
Offline members: thispilot, gfxv
10:14 andorvini > He's in the office, lost his access key.
Probably someone else got it and decided to pull a prank on us.
10:15 kc > ree got lucky they don't know where he works lol
10:16 andorvini > Who doesn't?
10:17 vapronva > frankly speaking i don't like this
andorvini@net.rit >Vladimir got inevitably distracted by the chat messages. The idea of someone finding the access key of a M-Link exec and using it just to send an ominous message to a group chat and leave it felt absurd to him. "You could off-load company secrets worth billions of Ririks and yet you decide to send a message and leave a goddamn group chat? Out of all things..." he muttered, slightly shaking his head as he was going through some of the issues assigned to him.
Interestingly enough, most of the issues were related to internal DNS services – systems that, at least historically, had always been among the most stable ones in the company. Nothing too serious though, but it reminded him of the documents he took from the printer...
> /find @kc
[0] DM@kc
> /enter 0
[ CHANNEL: DM@kc ]
Online members: kc
- Beginning of chatlog for Feb6-2021
10:24 vapronva > hey, are you busy?
10:25 kc > not really
10:25 vapronva > mind if i share something with you?
it's rather... interesting and is related to the printer
issues
10:26 kc > hm?
10:26 vapronva > so basically, it did print... something
10:26 vapronva > take a look, i have a digital version
10:26 = vapronva uploaded prt-lobby-job-5051.txt
10:27 = kc downloaded prt-lobby-job-5051.txt
10:27 kc > that's a lot of text, i'll go through it
and get back to you
10:28 vapronva > don't bother reading all of it
10:29 kc > not like i have anything better to do
vapronva@net.rit >kc was one of the more enigmatic members of the group. No one knew where he operates from, no one knows his name, no one knows even his age. "Alright, let's take a look at this..." he said while opening the file vapronva just sent him.
His eyes skimmed over the document, not focusing too much on the minute details. As he reached the last paragraph, a flicker of movement caught his attention. A few lights n the LED strip above his desk started glowing red.
The strip was a part of his personal status monitoring system, set up to track whether everything in his network was running smoothly. Red was never a good sign, but seems like the issue resolved itself, when he finished reading the strip was all green again.
[ CHANNEL: DM@vapronva ]
Online members: vapronva
10:53 kc > well that's new, a semi-religious(?) text about DNS?
10:54 vapronva > yeah...
10:55 kc > and it came from an IP address for one of the
root servers as well?
10:56 vapronva > from what i can tell yes, i don't have access
to network logs and a collegue of mine won't give it to me
he thinks i am pulling a prank on him
10:57 kc > to be perfectly honest, this does look like a prank
10:58 vapronva > yea...
10:58 kc > it ends pretty abruptly though, is that all you have?
10:59 vapronva > i think so, yes, but i might have an idea
11:00 kc > what kind of?
kc@net.rit >Just as the clock struck 11, it was time for vapronva to grab dinner. As he prepared to leave his desk for the cafeteria, his eyes landed on the folder with the printouts. After a moment's thought, he grabbed it.
"Might as well..." he muttered to himself, tucking them under his arm as he headed out.
As he walked down the stairs, he stumbled into Jackie.
"Long time no see! Any chance you took a look at the printer in the lobby?" Jackie asked.
"Yeah... I did, any chance it printed something weird? Something that no one picked up?" Vladimir replied.
"Sure did. Do you need access to these documents? I can send a request to The Archive for you," Jackie offered, eager to help as usual.
"Would appreciate that. When did it start happening again?"
"I dunno. It always acted up, but there've been a lot of unclaimed documents in the last three days or ago," Jack said.
"Great. Could I ask you to request all unclaimed documents from the lobby printer for the last 3 days on my behalf? If possible, ask them to provide physical copies directly to me," Vladimir said, whipping out his phone and sending Jackie the task number over RIRINET. "If they ask, I am working on this".
"So, request all unclaimed documents on your behalf for ticket #8800-555-3535, correct?" Jackie asked to confirm.
"That's the one."
"Will do after dinner."
"Thanks Jackie," Vladimir said with a nod, continuing on his way to the cafeteria.
Vladimir grabbed a bowl of šaltibarščiai and some fried potatoes, settling at a lone table. As he ate, he decided that he might as well read some more paragraphs from the enigmatic printout he'd picked up earlier.
The DNS was not created, I would even say it was never created in a way we think. When we decided to move away from that weird large hosts.txt and conceived DNS we didn't create or conceive it. We simply tore away the veil hiding the inner workings of our world and looked past it. And here, we took the wrong turn, a turn that will soon take us to our graves. We should've gazed, learned, studied and accepted the way the world is, but we simply peeked behind and never paid as much attention as we had.
This was the last paragraph on the printout Vladimir had taken from the lobby printer. He wasn't sure what any of it meant, why is was there, where is it coming from, but it was intriguing enough to keep digging...
Definitely Not The End.