Industry-Leading DNS Auditing

The DNS Institute enables domain owners and DNS professionals to monitor and check conformance and vulnerabilities of their DNS infrastructure, through scheduled protocol tests, vulnerability tests, alerts, news, and statistics with complete reporting. Our DNS auditing solutions enable organizations to proactively identify and remediate DNS misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, measure and manage risk, and ensure accuracy and compliance with no to little additional software or infrastructure costs.

The DNS Institute is a consulting and documentation service covering the Domain Name System and its security. Our offerings include: automated DNS monitoring, DNS server and client configuration reviews, custom DNS development, DNS server installations, DNS server conformance and regression testing, DNS zone data auditing, DNS vulnerability testing, server penetration testing, DNSSEC deployments, DNS performance evaluations, DNS installation and management instruction, DNS documentation, and more.

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Recent Research

• Summary of Audit of Top Ten Domains for Top TLDs (2021-10)
  Highlights of the interesting problems from analyzing the top domains for 62 most popular TLDs.
• ASN and Network Prefixes for TLD Nameservers (2021-10)
  Counts of different ASNs and network prefixes for each IPv4 nameserver (from root server delegations) for all TLDs.
• Running ancient 1990 BIND 4 on modern Internet
  DNS standards still mostly working after 30 years. This week-long study used a 386BSD port of 1990 4.3BSD-Reno's BIND named 4.8.3 with modern DNS for recursive and authoritative services.
• Russia Government Domains Analysis (2021-07)
  Identified over 20,000 DNS anomalies from research of 500 Russian Federation domains including very poor IPv6 and DNSSEC support, many nameservers without EDNS support, and several open resolvers.
• Summary of Analysis for Single Top Ranked Domain for Each TLD
  The most popular domain for many TLDs had interesting DNS problems.
• Popularity Rankings for TLDs
  Popularity Rankings table for 1200+ TLDs. The 10 most popular TLDs from the Tranco top sites list are com, net, ru, org, info, in, ir, uk, au, and de.
• DNS over IPv6 Research 2020-11 for Fortune 500 Companies
  129 Fortune 500 companies didn't have working DNS over IPv6.
• DNSSEC Report 2020-10 for Top 100 Banking Institutions
  Only 4.7% of the domains owned by the largest banks were DNSSEC signed.
• TLD Delegation and Nameserver Failures (2020-09)
  An analysis of 1508 top-level domain names found many interesting and even critical problems in at least 20 TLDs, including DNSSEC failures.
• DNS Nameserver Counts for Top Million Websites (2020-08)
  The most popular NS nameserver domain name was cloudflare.com.
• DNS Mistakes (Part 2): Lots of Typos
  More mistakes often caused by typos, copy-and-paste issues, or misunderstandings for what is allowed in DNS.
• DNS Mistakes (Part 1): Missing or Added Trailing Dots
  Technical mistakes caused with a missing trailing dot in zone files and for a trailing period appended when not meant to.
• Potential Email Compromise via Dangling DNS MX
  While the Dangling MX concept is already known, our paper also describes a novel vulnerability and research approach where the Dangling MX or other DNS target is an existing registered domain, but available for purchase or unknown third-party use.

Random Recent DNS Checks

• Japan Post Bank Co. Ltd. — japanpost.jp — Working nameservers must be in at least two topologically-separate networks (IPv6): WARNING
• USAA — usaa.com — RRSIG algorithm RSA/SHA-1 is not recommended : WARNING
• Nordea Bank AB — nordeabank.ru — There should be at least two working NS delegations : FAIL