Anyone who’s participated in an online community is familiar with the initiation ritual of choosing a handle. You know, that pseudonym everyone in the community will come to know you as. Some, whether by choice or ignorance, choose their given name (johnsmith). Others choose their favorite sports team (eaglesfan78), animal (reddragon), or character from their preferred media platform (picklerick). And some, use no imagination at all (user187384). Hacker handles tend to be leetspeak or technical jargon and mine is no exception. Before we get to that though, let me provide a little context.
Many years ago, I was browsing Slashdot (as one did before Reddit became a smash hit) and I came across this article on abusing DNS to surf the internet for free. This was one of the first “hacking” articles I’d ever read that struck me as absolutely brilliant.
To quickly summarize: the author describes how IP traffic can be tunneled over DNS. Microsoft (at the time) provided toll-free PPP dialin numbers which, once you’re connected, have DNS servers available. You could then just tunnel your traffic through those servers for free internet. It obviously required a pre-configured remote DNS server to extract the payload data and act as a proxy.
This combination of wrapping network traffic in a commonly used protocol so it tricks the service into sending and receiving data for you, bypassing an internet gateway, and getting to surf the internet for free; profoundly struck me. It’s been 24 years and I still think of this article on occasion. For these reasons, I chose to embody that awe in a hacker handle for myself: dnstun0. If you’re unfamiliar with Linux networking, it may be a little cryptic. The first half, DNS, is obviously the DNS protocol. The second half, tun0, is the network interface name given to a tunneling interface on Linux. Therefore “dnstun0” describes a network interface tunnel over DNS.
Putting a little bit of effort into choosing a handle can be a satisfying act of self-expression. I chose to use mine as an homage to hacking ingenuity and breaking the rules.