Connected to Port 53 - A Report from the DNS Hackathon 2023

Starting with Gratitude

This hackathon was a success, thanks to:

• All the participants who travelled from afar and put their time and energy into work during the weekend!
• Five sponsors: SIDN, NLnet Labs, ISC, Gcore, and ICANN.
• Three co-hosts: DNS-OARC, Netnod and RIPE NCC
• And the awesome Programme Committee, who also acted as jury: Victoria Risk, Shane Kerr, Moin Rahman, Moritz Müller, Qasim Lone, Yazid Akanho and Benno Overeinder!

Projects, Team Members and Results

All the results are available on GitHub : github.com/DNS-Hackathon-2023

SustainabiliTeam

Lain Aleix Samael Högy, Alex Pion, Malick Koupam Alassane, Joseph Gersch, Vesna Manojlovic

This was the only project to address the "sustainability" challenge - the long-term ecological, economic and social impact of DNS. The team's goal was was to publish a paper on sustainability in relation to DNS so as to raise awareness of the issue. The final-final-draft had an abstract and index and the work will continue!

DNSSEC Bootstrapping

Peter Thomassen, Joeri de Ruiter, Vincent Jumpertz, Rudi Kraus, Adam Burns

The goal of this project was to add DNSSEC bootstrapping support in open source nameservers, in order to help automatic deployment of DNSSEC. This was a very practical implementation of the "running code" for the IETF draft: during the event, for Knot DNS ("authsignal"), and in the future they might tackle PowerDNS!

DNS Today + DNS Home Appliance

Jonathan Magnusson, Artyom Minasyan, Kurt Kayser, Sarder Kamal, Lavie B.B., Q Misell, James Rice, Bernhard Degen

The questions this team was trying to answer were: What does DNS traffic look like today? And how different is it for network operators vs nameserver operators ? They analysed traffic logs provided by SIDN and learned a lot form each other during the process of designing "Tiny Lab".

In addition to this, Kurt Kayser presented his solo work on "low cost but fast DNS home appliance".

"Winners"

DNS and the application layer - aka DApper

Yuang Yuan, Asbjoern Sloth Toennesen, Jelmer Vernooij, Niall O'Reilly, André Melancia

This project was an attempt to match available DNS resolver library APIs to current and desired application needs. It aims to deliver a problem statement, a gap analysis, and a roadmap for future work in this area.

They were awarded for "Team tackled a difficult/important challenge and progressed a potential solution"!

Team: Oozing Awesomeness ; Project: DIG-alicious

Tony Finch, Sebastian Castro, Raffaele Sommese, Jonas Andersson, Alex Semenyaka, Annika Hannig, Emile Aben

This team worked on RIPE Atlas data compression and pre-scripting, with the achieved decrease from 24TB to 1.4TB! During the presentation, they did a demo loading multiple programmes successfully!

This team was aware for "Best teamwork, exemplified hackathon spirit".

DNS Oops (DNS Out of protocol signalling)

Doris Hauser, Willem Toorop, Henrik Kramselund, Stefan Ubbink, Vilhelm Prytz, Lars-Johan Liman

This was a follow-up on existing work from the IETF hackathon, and the achievement was an updated draft that will be presented at IETF117! In addition to that, they had "running code" based on BIND and secondaries running different software, and the end goal is to announce prefix depending on SOA serial.

This project won the award for "Most useful project for operators" and was presented at the DNS-WG at RIPE86 by Stefan Ubbink: see video and slides.

Follow-up

If you missed this hackathon, you can still contribute by:

• Joining us at Mattermost chat
• Doing a pull request or taking part in another way on GitHub
• Starting a topic on RIPE NCC forum: forum.ripe.net

We will meet again:

• At the IETF hackathon in San Francisco
• At IETF 118 in Prague: November
• At RIPE87 in Rome: DNS-WG and update on the progress

There are many more events where some of the participants will continue to promote the projects from the hackathon: DNS-OARC, Netnod, CENTR meetings... you can find them at ripe.net/events