Caching behaviour of InetAddress

[Alan Bateman]

Andreas Plesner Jacobsen wrote:
> :
> I don't think it's a significant change, since that's how getByName() 
> acts when the cache entries time out, so changing it would make it act 
> a lot more consistently.
>
> Actually, I think it's worth debating whether or not InetAddress 
> should cache lookups at all, I think it's more fitting to delegate 
> that to the underlying OS.
>
Search for a ~1996 paper on DNS spoofing attacks from Princeton 
University as that gives useful background on this topic and is the 
original reason for the caching. When a security manager is set then it 
caches forever and getByName will always return the same address. There 
was some capitulation on this topic in jdk6 so that it doesn't cache 
forever when there isn't a security manager. There was analysis done at 
the time on the implications of the change but I don't know if that 
included changing the behavior of the getByName method (Michael?).

-Alan.