ZDNS: A fast DNS toolkit for Internet measurement
Category: Tech matters
Blog home
Active DNS measurement is fundamental to understanding and improving the DNS ecosystem. However, the absence of an extensible, high-performance and easy-to-use DNS toolkit has limited both the reproducibility and coverage of DNS research.
To promote the scalability and reproducibility of DNS research, my colleagues and I at Stanford University have built ZDNS. ZDNS is a modular and open-source active DNS measurement framework optimized for large-scale research studies of DNS on the public Internet.
Key Points: • ZDNS is an open-source scanning system that can resolve 50M domains in 10 minutes and query the PTR records of the full public IPv4 address space in 12 hours. • ZDNS implements its own internal caching and recursion, thereby exposing internal DNS operations. • ZDNS provides a simple command line interface for scanning and outputs results in programmatically interpretable JSON.
