EURid, the registry for the .eu domain, has developed a new open source DNS (domain name server) called YADIFA as an alternative to existing DNS software such as BIND or Name Server Daemon (NSD). YADIFA is faster, more efficient and could be used by ISPs and big companies, EURid’s CTO said on Tuesday.
Security concerns drove EURid to develop YADIFA, which stands for Yet Another Domain Implementation For All to run alongside the servers it was already using, BIND and NSD, CTO Peter Janssen said. As a top-level domain (TLD) registry handling hundreds of thousands of queries per second, EURid decided it was preferable to have three domain name resolvers than two, just to be sure, he said.
The biggest motive behind developing YADIFA was security, said Janssen. That is why EURid decided to build the resolver from scratch. By not basing its resolver on BIND or any other existing DNS resolver, EURid wanted to make sure that possible vulnerabilities in those systems could not be adapted to exploit YADIFA, he said.
DNS software is an important part of the Internet, and acts as a phone book resolving IP addresses into domain names and vice versa. By using this system Internet users don’t have to remember IP addresses to visit websites but can just type in a domain name in the URL bar of their browser to visit the website of their choice.
The new DNS software is available under the BSD 3-Clause License, and according to Janssen it could be an interesting tool for big companies and ISPs that manage their own domains and thus their own DNS zone files.
Today they could use YADIFA as an alternative to their current DNS resolvers as EURid does, but in the future EURid plans to implement a generic back-end function that will enable access to SQL databases for zone file configuration, he said. If an ISP decided to use YADIFA, zone files would be picked up automatically, he said. EURid plans to add the function to YADIFA in the third quarter of 2013, according to the project road map.
YADIFA uses less memory than other name servers, handles more queries and loads zone files faster than any other name server in the industry, according to EURid. It can process up to 30 percent more queries, without dropping any data, than comparable set-ups using BIND or NSD name server implementations, the organization claimed. The organization posted a benchmark test to support these claims.
The software is cross platform, compiling on Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian and CentOS, and also on FreeBSD and Mac OS X. EURid said YADIFA will soon be ported to other Unix flavors such as OpenBSD and Solaris, while a Microsoft Windows version is also in the works.
YADIFA is compliant with DNSSEC (Domain Name Security Extensions), providing digital signatures to protect DNS resolvers from forged DNS data, EURid said.