Domain Names & Ip Address

[Papa John]

Since this may end up coming off long winded here is the tl;dr; the IP address used for websites isn't secure and the domain name provides no protection from finding out which IP the domain name is over.

 

So with that taken care of, onto the fun stuff. On a basic level your IP address (Ex. 123.456.789.0) and the IP addresses used by websites and other computers serves as a personal internet "street" address. Essentially it lets other computers who know it find out where in the internet you are located so they can send information to you. Your Internet Service Provider, or ISP, acts much like a city, state, or country by housing all the addresses and connecting to the world wide web by associating certain streets (IP ranges) with their network. In the early days of the internet it was required that you remember these long IP addresses to find out exactly who you wanted to send information. Now obviously remembering an arbitrary sequence of numbers for the ever increasing number of websites on the internet became a difficult task. In order to make remembering it easier domain names were created.

 

Domain names are simply just a work or sequence of characters used to easily locate the IP address. Take for example the IP address for the hellsgamers forum, 141.101.113.96, which produces a treasure trove of information for a computer to find out exactly where the information is, but not so easy for a person. Typing in the domain name "hellsgamers.com" is far easier to remember and also gives a basic description as to what you will find upon entering the website (in this case the gaming comminity Hellsgamers). However, this domain name isn't as helpful to the computer, which presents an interesting problem, how do get from one to the other without making it harder on the person or the computer. The answer comes in the form of DNS or Domain Name Service. It is usually bundled with the ISP service, but you can find public ones likes google's arguably faster DNS, and it will allow you to convert the domain name to an IP or vice versa. This way you can have the easy of use associated with domains names while still allowing the computer all the information it requires in an IP address.

 

Now I glossed over this in two paragraphs when I am sure many have written their college dissertations on the subject so it by no means is all encompassing of how IP address and Domain Names work (also writing this at midnight doesn't help). The point I was trying to make with this post is that domains names don't encrypt the IP address of the website, they don't protect the website from getting attacked by D/DOS attacks, and they are extremely easy to obtain. Which means you are not a leet hacker by posting them and you are not compromising the security of the website by posting the IP. For example, when the TS3 domain name wasn't resolving properly, and the direct IP was posted, the security of the TS3 server wasn't compromised because ultimately everyone's computer has to perform this process in the background regardless. The only benefit to using the domain name instead of the direct IP address would be if the IP happened to switch the domain name would be updated with the new IP and nothing would have to be changed. But that is generally just a minor inconvenience and really a matter of personal preference.

 

Now this last paragraph can largely be ignored by everyone except those who are going to nitpick by saying the example I used in the second paragraph includes the wrong server IP as the actual server IP is protected by a service called CloudFlare. Which you are correct, however, the service isn't implemented for TS3 (the actual point of the thread) and, generally speaking, it works in the same way so it works for the example. That said, if you did post the actual server IP, thereby bypassing CloudFlare, yes you could potentially be compromising the security of the website.