Ten Years of Passive DNS

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Ten Years of Passive DNS

	By Paul Vixie VP and Distinguished Engineer, AWS Security
	May 05, 2021 Views: 12,540 Add Comment

The report, “A Decade of Passive DNS” provides a longitudinal analysis of the use and popularity of top-level domains over a ten-year-period. The findings are based on what Farsight Security has seen in passive DNS from 2010-2019 based on a ten-year data rollup, excluding DNSSEC-related records. This study allows us to report on four measures for that period for each of the 1,576 IANA-recognized TLDs:

The total number of unique RRsets (unique combinations of RRname, RRtype, Rdata, Bailiwick, sensor or zone data): 130,780,406,614
The total number of unique fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) seen: 51,326,781,632
The total number of unique effective 2nd-level domains (or “delegation points”) seen: 1,071,823,976, and
The sum of counts, or total number of cache misses: 42,144,068,459,975.

Expectedly, the gTLD expansion added more nuisance than utility.

By Paul Vixie, VP and Distinguished Engineer, AWS Security

Dr. Paul Vixie is the CEO of Farsight Security. He previously served as President, Chairman and Founder of Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), as President of MAPS, PAIX and MIBH, as CTO of Abovenet/MFN, and on the board of several for-profit and non-profit companies. He served on the ARIN Board of Trustees from 2005 to 2013, and as Chairman in 2008 and 2009. Vixie is a founding member of ICANN Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC) and ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC).

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