Algorithms for Extraction and Visualization of Metadata from Domain Name Server Records
Arley Barros Leal da Silveira, Nuno M. García · 2010
Nowadays, security awareness is on every industry agenda. Mitigating threats and assessing risks is key to successful security posture and business continuity. Penetration tests are state-of-the-art and one of the main processes used by security professionals to discover, assess and evaluate a given infrastructure for potential security risks. On this paper we discuss Domain Name Server (DNS) information reconnaissance, a critical phase of any penetration test assessment, and present a tool that implements four different techniques to extract DNS metadata from a given domain namespace: TLD Rotation, Dictionary Attack, Brute Force Permutation and Typos. We present each algorithm and discuss the details of implementation of the tool. Finally, the integration of the tool with a powerful visualization engine to provide seamless graphical representations of the extracted data is discussed. The source code of the tool is available to further research.