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There are 13 of these root servers at the core of the global network's infrastructure. This network falls under the auspices of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an advisory group on Internet naming policy.
The central or A server, with its master list, is maintained by a US company, Network Solutions Inc, and is replicated daily to 12 others around the world. These servers are housed mostly in the US, at military and educational sites and NASA, although Japan, Sweden and Britain also have one each.
According to Excite@Home's Medin, a simultaneous, sustained distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, such as that executed recently against high-profile e-commerce sites Yahoo! and Amazon.com, would knock out all communications.
In the domain name system, when a plain-English Internet address is entered, an open-source software program, BIND, converts this to an Internet Protocol address composed of numbers. These numbers are used to route packets of data around the world.
The effects of a DDoS attack would not be immediately obvious, Medin warns. The popular sites would stay online slightly longer, as these are often cached. The damage would initially be revealed as more obscure sites started to go off the air.
Ultimately, entire nations, those without their own root servers - such as Australia - would become invisible to the rest of the online community.
As root servers are geographically widely dispersed, an attack against a single building would have only a minor impact. But in the lead-up to the Olympics, Medin does not rule out the possibility of a coordinated terrorist attack against each of the sites.
"You can hack into the Whitehouse.gov website, but they'll come looking for you, or you can attack the root servers, where they won't be looking for you.
"I used to run one at NASA and I could have taken out the Whitehouse and taken their e-mail. But hackers don't know that because they don't understand how the network works. People don't understand why things work in certain ways."
"The Net is really an illusion" of a single contiguous entity, Medin says, when it is actually a patchwork of networks knitted together by gentlemen's agreements.
"You don't see the seams until things break down," he says. "But the illusion works pretty well most of the time. It's testimony to the founding fathers that the illusion is better now than it used to be."
In July 1997, a power outage at the primary root server caused data to be corrupted, severely affecting the Net's operation. A week earlier, the US Government's Department of Commerce commissioned a discussion paper about the system's impending privatisation. "... The stability of the Internet should be the first priority of any DNS management system", it later found.
"Security and reliability of the DNS are important aspects of stability and, as a new DNS management system is introduced, a comprehensive security strategy should be developed."
In a request for comment (RFC2870) last June, the Internet Society said the "correct, safe, reliable, and secure operation of the Internet", was a prime concern as more activities were transacted.
"The root domain-name servers are seen as a crucial part of that technical infrastructure," the society said.
"We are confident that the, presumably temporary, loss of most of the root servers, should not significantly affect operation of the Internet."
It said the same physical and protocol security applied by a corporate or government datacentre needs to be applied.
"... The specific area in which the root server is located MUST have positive access control, i.e. the number of individuals permitted access to the area MUST be limited, controlled, and recorded."
So concerned is the society that the RFC demands redundant power backups in case of a coordinated attack against the power grids of cities that house root-server datacentres.
It also requires that capacity be at least three times the peak demand and to limit requests from outside zones, as a bulwark against DDoS attacks.
It advises that all intrusions be logged and these details shared with authorities in other countries, to identify patterns that may indicate a coordinated, concerted attack.
An Australia Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT) spokesman, Eric Halil, says any attack against the root servers would have a "significant" impact.
He says it would be a good idea if Australia lobbied for its own root server, to provide a better spread of assets globally.
"If you were able to disrupt the root servers at the same time, you certainly could affect the way the Net operates."
Halil says any attack would need to be coordinated within hours and sustained over days for maximum disruption, but redundant systems would make this difficult. Recovery time could stretch into days or weeks, leading to worldwide disruption of services.
Halil says the greater interconnection of networks meant any disruption would have unforseen consequences to a range of services. Coordination of counter-measures and security agencies' tracing of perpetrators could also be hampered as communications are affected.
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