Awesome DNS

A curated list of Domain Name System (DNS) related tools.

This list supersedes CENTR R&D projects table with a broader scope of all useful resources for DNS enthusiasts and professionals.

Contents

• Abuse detection
• Authoritative servers
• Crawlers
• Data validation
• DNSSEC
• Education
• Resolvers
• Testing and monitoring

Abuse detection

• LogoMotive - Detects logos on websites and provides insights into logos (mis)use.
• RegCheck - Machine learning library to assess the risk of domain name registrations.

Authoritative servers

• BIND - Flexible, full-featured DNS system.
• Drink - An experimental authoritative name server (DNS server), intended for dynamic answers.
• Knot DNS - High-performance authoritative DNS server.
• NSD - Authoritative DNS name server for environments where speed, reliability, stability and security are of high importance.
• PowerDNS Authoritative - Authoritative DNS name server with databases and scripting languages support.
• YADIFA - Clean room implementation with small memory footprint.

Crawlers

• DNS crawler (.cz) - DNS crawler for getting info about a huge number of DNS domains.
• Mercator - An Open Source robust and scalable crawler for collecting information on the usage of domain names.
• Signs of Life - Domain name crawler tool used in CENTR

Data validation

• OpenPAQ - Validates postal addresses to ensure data accuracy and integrity. Its core strength is handling real-world inputs with abbreviations, variants, extras, and typos.

DNSSEC

• cascade - A friendly DNSSEC signing solution: sensible defaults, controllability, observability and flexibility written in Rust.
• DNSViz - DNSSEC-signed zone status analysis and visualisation.
• LDNS - C Library and command-line tools to simplify DNS and DNSSEC operations.
• OpenDNSSEC - Policy-based zone signer that automates the process of keeping track of DNSSEC keys and the signing of zones.
• SoftHSM - Software implementation of a cryptographic store accessible through a PKCS#11 interface.
• validns - DNS and DNSSEC zone file validator.

Education

• EduDig - A web-based "dig" tool that helps to understand DNS and dig.

Resolvers

• BIND - Flexible, full-featured DNS system.
• Knot Resolver - A caching DNS resolver scalable from huge resolver farms down to home network routers.
• PowerDNS Recursor - High-end, high-performance resolving name server with multi-processor and scripting support.
• Unbound - A validating, recursive, caching DNS resolver designed to be fast and lean.

Testing and monitoring

• blaeu - Programs to create distributed Internet measurements on the network of RIPE Atlas probes.
• check_dns_soa - Nagios (or compatible, like Icinga) plugin to monitor all the name servers of a DNS zone.
• check-soa - A simple command-line DNS testing tool.
• dns-lg - DNS Looking Glass.
• dnssoftver - A tool to fingerprint DNS resolver software.
• DNS Workbench - Test multiple (authoritative) name server implementations.
• ENTRADA - Easily store and analyze large amounts of DNS traffic.
• IntoDNS.AI - AI-powered DNS & email security scanner: checks SPF, DKIM, DMARC, BIMI, MTA-STS, DNSSEC and 40+ blacklists with copy-paste AI fixes. No signup required.
• Internet.nl - Check whether a website, email or internet connection uses modern Internet Standards.
• Zonemaster - A software package that validates the quality of a DNS delegation.
• Tapdance - A configurable, near real-time authoritative DNS statistics collector based on dnstap.

Contributing

Contributions welcome! Read the contribution guidelines first.

Footnotes

This awesome list is curated by CENTR (Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries)