Pith Number

pith:LVLCFEGN

pith:2026:LVLCFEGNNMVSQEIVGW54BLDXGM

not attested not anchored not stored refs resolved

The Internet Runs on Names

Geoff Huston, Lixia Zhang

DNS names now serve as the Internet's foundation for identity, reachability, load balancing, and trust, while IP addresses act only as ephemeral routing locators.

arxiv:2605.15646 v1 · 2026-05-15 · cs.NI

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Add to your LaTeX paper

\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{LVLCFEGNNMVSQEIVGW54BLDXGM}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

DNS names have become the basis for service identity, reachability, load balancing, and trust, while IP addresses have become ephemeral routing locators. This change was driven by application needs and platform consolidation in the absence of any overarching plan.

C2weakest assumption

The observed shift to name-based operation constitutes a fundamental mismatch with the original TCP/IP design that necessarily produces growing operational complexity, fragility, and vulnerability.

C3one line summary

The Internet now operates primarily on DNS names for services while IP addresses function only as ephemeral routing locators, creating an unplanned mismatch with the original TCP/IP address-based architecture.

References

28 extracted · 28 resolved · 0 Pith anchors

[1] 2025.Post-Incident Report: DynamoDB DNS Race Condition in US-EAST-1 2025

[2] 2024.Sandvine’s 2024 Global Internet Phenomena Report: Global Internet Usage Continues to Grow 2024

[3] R. Arends, R. Austein, M. Larson, D. Massey, and S. Rose. 2005.DNS Security Introduction and Requirements. RFC 4033. IETF. https://www. rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4033 The Internet Runs on Names 2005

[4] Matt Calder, Xun Fan, Zi Hu, Ethan Katz-Bassett, John Heidemann, and Ramesh Govindan. 2013. Mapping the Expansion of Google’s Serving Infrastructure. InProceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conf 2013 · doi:10.1145/2504730.2504754

[5] David D. Clark. 1988. The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols. InProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference. 106–114 1988

Formal links

1 machine-checked theorem link

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-20T00:01:09.878116Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

5d562290cd6b2b28111535bbc0ac77332e4b1b13dd30eaa44d53640505d4d319

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.15646 · arxiv_version: 2605.15646v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.15646 · pith_short_12: LVLCFEGNNMVS · pith_short_16: LVLCFEGNNMVSQEIV · pith_short_8: LVLCFEGN

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/LVLCFEGNNMVSQEIVGW54BLDXGM \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 5d562290cd6b2b28111535bbc0ac77332e4b1b13dd30eaa44d53640505d4d319

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "be5133639ac363c9d5553ca8e2a1ad532d69d45bf9e40ee3bc22df1fef4feaad",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.NI",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-15T06:01:30Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "09e36cd022b27210ffa3fb7f03d78c7aa78671ea803bf8ef19efac5decf09f5f"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.15646",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}