DNS Work and Consultancy

DNS

We have a range of experience in protocol development and operations (primarily of TLD services).

We have been involved in the evolution of TCP as a transport service for DNS in recent years, including contributing to RFC7766 (DNS Transport over TCP – Implementation Requirements).

We have worked on the development of DNS-STATS, an Open Source suite of tools for DNS traffic capture and visualization. ICANN use this software, including for the public front-end for their IMRS statistics dashboard. Data is collected in  C-DNS format – a compact DNS specific capture format using our implementation called the DNS-STATS Compactor.

Thanks to the generous support of a small project award from NLNet Foundation we produced an implementation of NSCP called DNSCCM (DNS Configuration, Control and Monitoring).

We have attended multiple IETF Hackathons as part of the DNS/DNSSEC/DNS Privacy team – where the team won prizes on several occasions. We are members of DNS-OARC.

DNS Privacy

We are currently involved in the DNS Privacy project which is a collaborative project with several organisations including NLnet Labs. The project is aimed at providing support for RFC7858 (DNS-over-TLS) and other related features in a range of nameserver implementations, including getdns and unbound.

We also focus on deployment and operations issues associated with providing DNS Privacy. We have recently co-authored and implemented DNS Zone Transfers over TLS and are currently involved in a proposal for DNS-over-QUIC.

Sara Dickinson is co-chair of the DNS Privacy Workshop (co-hosted with NDSS) and the Privacy Enhancement and Assessment Proposed Research Group in IRTF.

DNS Security (DNSSEC)

For several years we were involved in the development and project management of OpenDNSSEC a widely used DNSSEC signing and management tool.

John Dickinson is an author of RFC7583 a detailed analysis of the timings involved when performing key rollover in DNSSEC. He is also an author on RFC8901, Multi-signer DNSSEC Models.

Consultancy

We have provided consultancy services to several major Internet organisations including ICANN, ISC, Nominet, IIS, Verisign Labs and Salesforce.

We also provide consultancy to companies wanting to upgrade or migrate their business critical DNS infrastructure.

Personal Consultancy

John Dickinson is a member of ICANN’s Registry Services Technical Evaluation Panel (RSTEP).

John Dickinson was a member of ICANN’s 2015 Root KSK rollover design team.

DNS Training

Sinodun gave a DNSSEC tutorial at Networkshop 42 on behalf of OpenDNSSEC.

We were also involved in the getdns tutorial given at RIPE 69.

Sara Dickinson gave IETF EDU tutorials on DNS Privacy at IETF 97 and 99.