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 training, 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 courseware, DNS installation and management instruction, DNS documentation, and more.

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Research Examples

• The various types of Dangling DNS
  We recently found around 345 potential dangling DNS records. This article briefly introduces eight types of Dangling DNS with examples, including "Dangling Private IP Addresses."
• Still serving expired domains (2025-04)
  Previously registered and delegated old domains continue to be served from unmaintained nameservers.
• Analyzing Internationalized (IDN) Country Code TLDs (2025-03)
  Analyzed 61 country code TLDs that are Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) using xn-- punycode and identified 8437 anomalies or failures.
• Hijacking registered domains (2024-08)
  Looking for "Sitting Ducks" domains where their delegations point to authoritative DNS hosting services that no longer serve for the domain.
• Finding out-of-sync TLD nameservers (2024-05)
  Looking at nameservers for 1448 TLDs to find zones that possibly are out-of-date by comparing SOAs and RRSIGs.
• DNS over IPv6 for Czech Republic Domains (2024-02)
  An analysis of Czech Republic government domains indicated that around 22% of the domains had an IPv6 mistake related to DNS and 7% completely failed for DNS over IPv6.
• DNSSEC Research for Largest 100 Banks (2022-12)
  Twenty-eight of the top 100 global banks had at least one DNS domain with DNSSEC. Only 9.4% of the domains owned by the largest banks were DNSSEC signed. The banks with the most DNSSEC-signed domains were State Bank of India (26), Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (22), and Svenska Handelsbanken AB (15).
• SPF Record Problems (2022-05)
  DNS Institute identified SPF (Sender Policy Framework) problems in around 4.2% of domains.
• SPF and Dangling DNS Targets (2022-05)
  DNS Institute found over 80 SPF records that had policies using currently non-existent domains which may be available for purchase or assignment from domain resellers, brokers, squatters, registrars, or subdomain hosting providers.
• Top Ten Most Frequent Test Failures (2022-04)
  We have ran over a third of a million test runs resulting in over fifty-one million individual test results. Some of the tests fail so frequently they can be considered just unimportant noise — or are they?
• Analyzing OpenNIC (2022-01)
  Quick audit of over a thousand delegated domain names found under the alternative DNS root OpenNIC identified tens of thousands of issues (58 unique) including two expired TLDs. Interestingly, we learned that many of the domains also used delegations under standard DNS.
• 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.

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